Mater Dei Pitcher Bollinger to Receive National Award

Mater Dei pitcher Tia Bollinger has been selected Gatorade National High School Softball Player of the Year, Monarch Coach Ed Ulloa said Tuesday.

Bollinger will be honored in a ceremony at the school Thursday morning. She was recently named the state’s top player by Gatorade.

Bollinger pitched 230 1/3 innings and had a record of 30-2. Her earned-run average was 0.30 and she struck out 389 batters.

“This kind of takes the sting out of losing the championship to Foothill last week,” Ulloa said of the 1-0 defeat in which Bollinger was the losing pitcher. “She’s one heck of a trouper, a great student-athlete.”

BASKETBALL

Hawaii’s Ms. Basketball for the last two seasons, Brandy Richardson will be attending Brea Olinda High in the fall, according to her high school coach, Chico Furtado.

Richardson, a junior this season at Kailua Kalaheo High, led her team to the league title in the 21-team Oahu Interscholastic Assn., before losing in the state finals to Kamehameha.

Richards, a 5-11 forward, averaged 21 points and 16 rebounds for the Mustangs (26-3). She has been on the all-state team for three years and was the Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s Ms. Basketball as a sophomore and junior.

“She dominates, but what we don’t have here and the mainland has, is size,” Furtado said. “At 5-11, with her strength, she can dominate. When we took her to Las Vegas last year, she did a pretty good job playing against 6-2, 6-3 girls.”

She joins a Brea program that won the last three state titles in Division II, and graduated two post players, Chelsea Trotter and Jill Trader.

Richards also ran cross-country and was the soccer goalkeeper for Kalaheo.

* Brooke Fairchild is the fifth girls’ basketball coach in less than seven years at Newport Harbor High. She was hired to replace Greg Savage, who resigned after two seasons.

A native of North Carolina, Fairchild attended Pepperdine and the University of Denver. She began her coaching career in Colorado and most recently has been working at a private school in Huntington Beach.

Newport Harbor was 4-23 last season.

* Josh Garrett from Irvine Valley College has committed to play basketball at Bemidji (Minn.) State, Laser Coach Jerry Hernandez said.

A 6-9, 260-pound center from Capistrano Valley High, Garrett averaged 5.0 points and 3.9 rebounds last season.

* Steve Brooks, who resigned at Los Alamitos High last fall amid allegations of misappropriation of funds, has been hired at Valley Center High near Escondido as boys’ basketball coach, according to a Valley Center spokesman.

Brooks was a winning coach who led the basketball and volleyball teams at Los Alamitos for nearly 20 years. But last July school officials, acting on complaints from a group of parents and players, launched an investigation into the finances of an annual winter basketball tournament Brooks organized for at least a dozen years.

In January, the Orange County District Atty.’s Office declined to prosecute, but advised the school district to pursue the matter in civil court. Brooks’ attorney has said the former coach is not guilty of the allegations.

BASEBALL

El Dorado baseball Coach Steve Gullotti, who led the Golden Hawks to the Southern Section Division III title in 1999, is taking a one-year leave of absence to reevaluate his future.

Third base coach Matt Stine will assume coaching duties in Gullotti’s absence.

Gullotti’s teams have posted a 369-165 record in his 20 years at the school.

COMMUNITY COLLEGE

Soccer player Tomas Serna of Santa Ana and distance runner Zoila Gomez of Orange Coast were selected Orange County community college athletes of the year in a vote of sports information directors.

Serna’s coach, J.P. Frutos of Santa Ana, and Gomez’s cross country coach, John Goldman, won coach of the year honors.