High School Review : Metropolitan Teams Miss Tee Times

SAN DIEGO —  For the first time in 28 years, Mar Vista High School will not have a golf team--and neither will four other schools in the nine-school Metropolitan Conference.

“You need eight golfers to make the team go, and we only had three,” said Donald Langdon, who was golf coach the past 10 years at the school. “We’re going to see if we can do it next year.”

Sweetwater Coach Bill Yensen had the same problem.

“We just could not find enough kids who knew which end of the golf club you should get hold of,” Yensen said. “The best kid I had last year averaged worse than a double-bogey each hole. It’s just a pity that more kids aren’t interested.”

Montgomery, Marian and Southwest also will not have teams. Langdon said the conference’s boys’ volleyball program, which begins this spring, has attracted some former golf team members.

Eileen Maul, Santana High School’s two-sport star who for the past three years has collected San Diego Section spring sports championships the way some people collect baseball cards, is out of action this season with torn ligaments in her left rotator cuff.

Maul, a senior, won the San Diego Section girls’ diving championships in 1985, 1986 and 1987 and was the San Diego Section gymnastics overall optional champion in 1985 and 1986. But she fell to sixth place last spring in the overall optional when she competed with a sprained right wrist and torn ligaments in her shoulder.

“I woke up one morning three days before the CIF gymnastics finals last spring, and my shoulder was hurting,” Maul said. “I thought I had just slept on it wrong.”

A trip to the doctor revealed damage to the rotator cuff, and Maul was faced with a decision: undergo surgery or enter a rehabilitation program. She opted for rehabilitation but, after nine months, said the shoulder still is in bad shape.

“Some days, I can’t even lift my arm over my head to put a shirt on, and other days I feel like I can do handstands,” Maul said.

Her rehabilitation prescription expired last month, so the next step is surgery. She hasn’t decided when.

Meanwhile, her gymnastics career appears to be finished. “I already miss gymnastics,” Maul said. “I want to compete so bad because it’s my last chance.”

If she has her way, her diving career is not yet complete. Maul’s goal is to earn a college diving scholarship.

April 1 doesn’t arrive until next week, but spectators at the 11th annual Tiger Relays track meet Saturday got an early taste of a practical joker. And the folks from Lincoln didn’t appreciate it.

While the Tiger Relays were being conducted, the Lincoln basketball team was playing Daly City Jefferson for the state Division III boys’ basketball championship in Oakland.

Soon after the game began, an unidentified person walked into the press box at Glenn Broderick Stadium, site of the Tiger Relays, and reported a halftime score to public address announcer and Morse track coach Gary MacDonald: Lincoln 64, Daly City Jefferson 29.

MacDonald dutifully passed the information along over the loudspeakers, and Lincoln athletes and fans cheered.

Later, the same person popped his head into the press box and told MacDonald that Lincoln was ahead, 96-64, with two minutes to play. A couple of minutes later, the person corrected himself and said it was a final. Sure enough, MacDonald announced the scores again, and people cheered.

Spectators at the Oakland Coliseum Arena watched a different game, and Lincoln fans at the track meet heard about it later that night or read about it in the paper the next day. You can bet they were surprised. The final: Daly City Jefferson 76, Lincoln 71.

“I should have been smarter and asked him how he knew,” MacDonald said. “It was a ‘gotcha.’ I’d been had. What are you going to do?”

Approximately 40 of the county’s top high school basketball stars will compete Friday in the San Diego County Slam-N-Jam Contest at 7:30 p.m. at Mt. Carmel High School. The field includes James Jones of Poway and Scott Winne of Monte Vista, who advanced to the semifinals last year. Also competing are six members of The Times’ Boys’ All-County basketball team: El Camino’s Lee Cobb and Scott Oatsvall, Kearny’s Randy Robinson, Madison’s Jeff Alexander and Torrey Pines’ Kevin Flanagan and Courtie Miller.