Prep column: Thrown to the T-wolves

Barry Faulkner

For those who haven’t noticed, Northwood High, it’s campus still

pristine and still months away from graduating its inaugural senior

class, has officially claimed its long-rumored status as an athletic

power.

And, having taken enough lumps its first two or three seasons of

varsity competition (depending on the sport) to keep it just under the

releaguing radar, it will be terrorizing Pacific Coast League competition

-- namely Corona del Mar -- the next four years as a member of the

powerhouse projection program.

The Timberwolves, now fully fanged in about every sport there is, won

the school’s first CIF Southern Section crown recently when the boys

soccer team, which finished second to Costa Mesa in the PCL race,

defeated top-seeded Bonita, 2-1, to claim the Division IV title.

The Northwood baseball team, with Irvine High transfer Chris Lewis, a

Stanford-bound shortstop who was an All-Sea View performer his first

three seasons, defeated defending PCL champion CdM Friday, 5-2. Lewis

unleashed three home runs in three at-bats against the Sea Kings’ ace

pitcher. Afterward, Northwood Coach Rob Stuart, another Irvine defector,

downplayed his team’s favored status, though PCL coaches have clearly

tabbed the T-wolves the team to beat for months. One of Stuart’s

assistants is Aron Garcia, the former Northwood Little League legend who

starred in football and baseball at Irvine, where he was also a member of

Coach Terry Henigan’s football staff.

Coach Rick Curtis, another former Irvine employee, guided his

Northwood football squad to a 10-0 regular season with its first senior

class last fall, outscoring five PCL rivals, 194-51.

Former Estancia High and Orange Coast College coach Tim O’Brien led

his boys basketball team to a 10-0 mark against PCL competition to claim

the program’s first league crown this season.

Boys volleyball, sans seniors, shared the PCL title with CdM last

spring and this year’s squad met Newport Harbor in the title match of the

Orange County Championships Monday night.

And that is just off the top of my head.

Irvine High folks have foretold of the flight of their top athletes to

Northwood since before it opened and their worst fears have come to

fruition.

For athletic purposes, Northwood High has assumed Irvine’s former high

profile, while the Vaqueros are left bailing water from a sinking

athletic ship, of which the captain and crew will soon be kicking

themselves for not being more proactive about leaving the Sea View League

during the last releaguing process.

The good news: At least Costa Mesa and Estancia will leave the PCL

behind to compete in the Golden West League, beginning next fall.

However, PCL holdover CdM could be among those thrown to the T-wolves

for at least the next four years.

The amorphous Newport Elks Tournament is now history and Costa Mesa

High baseball coach Kirk Bauermeister assures me it will return to a more

conventional look next season.

This year, with an odd 24-team configuration, it was broken down into

the 16-team Costa Mesa Division and the eight-team Foothill Division.

The Costa Mesa Division, with Mesa, Newport Harbor and Estancia,

played a straight 16-team bracket. The Foothill Division, including CdM,

divided into two pools, with each school playing the other three in its

pool once. They then paired off with schools from the other pool for a

fourth game.

Of course it took about three games into the event to figure this

format out, by which time, we’d already misled readers and confused

ourselves beyond frustration.

Finally, both pools intermingled to milk the fifth game allotted teams

in a 24-team tournament. Hence, Costa Mesa finished up with a loss after

playing and winning its division title game seven days before.

So, after typing the phrase “in the fifth-place game of the Newport

Elks Tournament’s Costa Mesa Division,” we had to try -- and inevitably

fail -- to come up with a way to describe a meaningless final “tack-on”

game in some way that made sense.

Another source of consternation in our newsroom recently was Corona

del Mar High’s decision not to score two season-opening track and field

tri-meets.

I wondered aloud if every athlete had received a hug and a ribbon at

the finish line, at the expense of competition.

But, upon further investigation, Sea Kings boys and girls coach Bill

Sumner at least had a good excuse.

Turns out, Sumner knew running a three-way meet would be exponentially

more difficult than the typical dual meet and he turned out to be

correct. He didn’t want to be scoring the meet, run out of light to

contest the final event(s) and come off looking like, well, the guys

running the Newport Elks Tournament.

Sumner said he and his staff of volunteers, including several parents,

learned a great deal about ironing out potential kinks in the process and

he’ll be happy to score trimeets next season.

Give the man a hug.