Fairmont Will Try Its Luck on Football Field This Fall

Fairmont, a prep school in Anaheim known more for brains than brawn, plans to field a football team next season.

Athletic Director J.T. Cameron said the school expects to hire a full-time coach within a month and is petitioning the Southern Section to play in Division XIII.

“We feel we’ve had a very positive response about starting a football team,” Cameron said. “We feel we challenge our students in a very successful academic program and we’ll encourage them to get involved with football.”

Cameron said Fairmont, which has about 2,000 students, including pupils at three elementary and two middle schools, has had problems retaining students after they are promoted from the eighth grade to high school. Having a football team might convince some of them to attend the high school, where tuition ranges from $6,000 to $8,000 a year.

“We lose a lot of students in the junior high program who might want to benefit from a full athletic program,” Cameron said. “We feel some of them would like the full social aspect of a football game on Friday nights.”

Fairmont currently offers seven girls’ sports and five boys’ sports.

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The Mission Viejo and Capistrano Valley girls’ soccer teams resume their friendly, but intense, rivalry Thursday at Capistrano Valley. The teams have met five times over the past two years.

The combined scores are 6-6.

They tied twice in South Coast League play last year, then Mission Viejo beat Capistrano Valley, 1-0, on an own goal in the 78th minute of the Southern Section Division I championship.

This year, top-ranked Capistrano Valley defeated third-ranked Mission Viejo, 2-1, at the Excalibur tournament, then tied the Diablos two weeks ago in league play, 2-2.

The key to both games this season has been the goalkeeping of Mission Viejo’s Hannah Cochrun.

“She kept them in the first game with three big saves and she made two excellent saves in league to keep it tied,” Capistrano Valley Coach Jack Peterson said.

Thursday’s game will probably go a long way toward deciding the league title. Capistrano Valley is 12-0-3 and 3-0-1 in league; Mission Viejo is 12-4-3 and 2-0-2.

“It wouldn’t matter if we were 31st and 32nd in the county rankings,” Peterson said. “Emotions run high. I would never call these games dirty, but it’s pretty physical. It truly is a war of attrition.”

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Northwood, the new school in Irvine to open in the fall, is not likely to have any boys’ varsity teams its first season, said Rick Curtis, athletic director. But Northwood, which will be comprised of freshmen and sophomores its first year, will probably field varsity girls’ sports in cross-country, swimming and softball.

Curtis’ primary concern is with competitive equity.

“We want to put kids in positive situations,” he said. “What you see is a lot of freshmen playing girls’ basketball, running and, in our area, swimming. But you don’t see a lot of freshmen and sophomores [on the varsity] in boys’ sports. It just doesn’t happen.”

Curtis said he doesn’t expect any backlash from the community over not fielding boys’ varsity teams.

“If the kids are able to qualify and run varsity times, they can go to the league meet and qualify for CIF individually,” Curtis said. “If we had a pack of five or six that could run varsity-level times, we’d do it. That’s something we’ll just have to see about when we get in.

“Normally, it takes boys longer to develop in that competitive structure.”

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A girls’ water polo showdown between Irvine High and Marina will be played at 6 tonight at the Heritage Park Aquatics Complex located adjacent to Irvine High.

The game was originally scheduled for Friday.

Fifth-ranked Marina is the defending Southern Section Division I champion, and Irvine is ranked No. 1 in the Orange County coaches’ poll.

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Matt Winter, a 6-foot-1 guard, scored 14 points in his first game for Heritage Christian last week. The effort helped the Patriots upset Norwalk Pioneer Baptist, the seventh-ranked boys’ basketball team in the Southern Section Division Division V-A, 55-54.

Winter, who began the year playing at Fontana Ambassador Christian, transferred after receiving a hardship release from the Dawgs, according to Heritage Christian Coach Mark Berokoff.

With the arrival of Winter, who scored 37 points in a 62-55 victory over St. Michael’s Prep on Dec. 15, Heritage Christian (8-8, 1-0 in the Express League) “could go very far into the playoffs,” according to Berokoff.

“He’s that extra guy we needed,” Berokoff said. “He was an all-league player as a freshman and sophomore at Ambassador.”

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When they played in December, Harbor City Narbonne defeated Brea Olinda, 50-48, with a basket in the final seconds to win the third-place girls’ basketball game at the Santa Barbara Tournament of Champions. At the time, Narbonne was ranked first in the state and Brea second.

Brea (14-3) has since dropped to fourth, but that shouldn’t take anything away from Saturday’s 7:30 p.m. rematch at Brea.

The circumstances will certainly be different. At Santa Barbara both teams were coming off losses the night before. Against Narbonne, Brea lost a seven-point lead with 3:09 left in the game.

“You left that game in Santa Barbara feeling it was unfinished,” said Brea center Chelsea Trotter, who had just two rebounds. “Just two more seconds and we would have pulled it out. We should have won. It makes you so angry.”

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The Buena Park boys’ basketball team (16-4, 3-0) made some noise this week in the county sportswriters’ poll, picking up enough votes to be listed among the others. The Coyotes face a stiff test Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Sonora (15-5, 3-0).

That the Coyotes are even mentioned delighted Coach Ed Matillo, who said he has one of the best teams to play at Buena Park in a long time.

“Everyone always talks about Sonora and Troy in our league,” he said. “For as long as I can remember, no other team has come close to touching them. So for us to make it a race, this is good for our league.”

The Coyotes, who defeated visiting Troy, 47-38, on Jan. 8, have been led by 6-6 senior center Matt Okoro, who leads the county in rebounding (14 per game) and field-goal percentage (72%). Okoro, who is also a fine shot-blocker, has made 137 of 190 field-goal attempts.

Guard DeAndre Gipson (14.6 points, 3.1 assists) and teammate Jamaal Allen, slowed by an ankle injury early in the season, have also been playing well, Matillo said.

Staff writers Dave McKibben, Martin Henderson and Peter Yoon contributed to this story.