JC Notes / Irene Garcia : El Camino Breezing Through South Coast Softball League

Looks like another winning season for El Camino softball Coach Julie Feenstra. The Warriors have gone through two rounds of South Coast Conference play undefeated. On Wednesday they beat Long Beach, 3-0, to give them a 10-0 record in the six-member SCC. El Camino is 17-10 overall.

Feenstra, in her ninth year as head coach, led her team to the state tournament last year and a second place in league. This season is even better for the Warriors, who are in a conference with Cerritos, Harbor, Pasadena, Long Beach and Mt. San Antonio.

El Camino has been led by pitcher Candy Carrico, who has also been a force at the plate and in the outfield. The freshman from Leuzinger High has a 7-0 conference pitching record and she’s the team’s second best hitter with a .348 average and eight RBIs.

Catcher Carolyn Pele leads the Warriors with a .462 average. The sophomore from San Pedro High also leads the team with 15 RBIs. She went two for two with two RBIs against Long Beach. Sondra Nelson, a sophomore from West Torrance High, was two for three with two RBIs.

“We also have some good, strong freshman this year,” said El Camino assistant coach Sue Nelson. “The league is obviously weaker this year, but we have some great athletes and I think we can go all the way to the (state) finals.”

The Warriors start their final round of conference play today when they play host to Cerritos at 3 p.m.

As expected, Harbor’s baseball team is cruising through the weak Southern California Athletic Conference. The Seahawks improved their first-place SCAC lead to four games with a 9-3 victory over Los Angeles City College on Tuesday.

Right-hander Leonard Fletcher allowed three hits in 8 1/3 innings to improve Harbor’s SCAC record to 9-2-1 (20-12-1 overall). The 6-foot-3 sophomore from Banning High has a 2-1 record.

El Camino is struggling in the tough South Coast Conference. The Warriors started SCC play with a three-game winning streak in mid-March, but immediately afterwards they fell twice to Cerritos and twice to Long Beach.

After Tuesday’s 7-1 loss to Mt. San Antonio, the Warrior SCC record fell to 5-6 (23-12 overall). El Camino wiped the Mounties, 16-7, when the two last met in March. El Camino got only six hits against Mt. Sac in the latest encounter.

First-year El Camino swim Coach Corey Stanbury predicted that the scrappy teams he rounded up at the last minute would win at least one conference meet.

Last week it came true. The men’s and women’s teams scored their first SCC dual meet victories in a tri-meet with Cerritos and Fullerton. The men defeated Fullerton, 82-14, and the women defeated Cerritos, 70-32, and Fullerton, 79-25.

The men were led by Todd Douglas, who won the 200-yard breaststroke in 2:20, and Eddie Aquiro, who took the 200 backstroke in 2:20.2. The women were led by Nicole Standardi, a freshman from Rolling Hills High. She won the 500 freestyle in 5:57.

Looks like El Camino is keeping Ron McClurkin as its basketball coach for at least one more year. Paul Landreaux asked for another year’s leave of absence to stay on as an assistant basketball coach at UCLA.

“That’s fine with me,” McClurkin said. “We’re just going to take it one year at a time. Next year we’ll be bigger and better than ever--so look out.”

Old-timers are still remembered at El Camino. Several of the school’s big-time athletes and coaches from the 1950s and 1960s were recently inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame.

They include Jim Clark, Bob Anderson, Rick Eber and Gloria Quintana. Clark was the first Warrior to be named a junior college football All-American in 1954. Anderson was named the state’s outstanding wrestler in 1964 after winning the Metro Conference, regional and state titles.

Eber was a track and football star in 1965. He was the Metro Conference Most Valuable Player and caught 52 passes for 1,006 yards, 10 touchdowns and 62 points. He set the school record in the triple jump at 44-7.

Quintana was a softball and tennis star from 1949 to 1951. She played professional softball and was inducted into the Softball Hall of Fame in 1965. She was also the state’s top-ranked junior college tennis player.