Jasmine Contreras smashes a home run against Westview.
A powerful offense has been the hallmark of the Valley Center varsity softball team so far this season, and the Lady Jaguars took advantage of their big bats in taking a big win over Holtville last week. But Wednesday’s home loss against Westview has the Lady Jags focusing on defense and fundamentals heading into the Jaguar Classic Tournament this week. The Lady Jaguars hosted Holtville on March 18 and exploded for seven runs in the first inning en route to a dominating 12–2 victory. After the big first inning, Valley Center added another run in the fourth before Holtville pushed two runs across in the top of the fifth. But the Lady Jaguars put the seal on the win with four runs in the bottom of the fifth to end the game. Leadoff hitter Jasmine Contreras came up big with a home run and a double, with two RBIs and two runs scored, while Stephanie Koishor smashed a two-run home run in the game. Alex Scoles added a double and a single, with two runs scored and a stolen base, while Emma Sloman had two hits, two RBIs and two runs, Andrea Torres had a hit, two RBIs and two runs, Raelyn Rodriguez had a hit, an RBI and a run, Ashley Nuñez had a hit, a run and a stolen base, Anna Luna scored a run and Mindy Faber stole a base. Anna Luna rips this pitch for a hit.
Sloman pitched an excellent game to get the win, giving up two runs on four hits, with two walks and six strikeouts, in five innings of work. The Lady Jaguars couldn’t get in rhythm offensively at home on Wednesday against Westview, and a number of errors doomed them to a 9–2 loss. Valley Center committed five errors in the game, and they came at the most inopportune times. The Lady Jags had three errors in the third inning and the Lady Wolverines scored four runs, then Valley Center made two errors in the fifth, allowing Westview to bring four more runs across to put the game out of reach. The Lady Jaguars had another good start on offense, as Contreras blasted a solo home run to lead off the first inning. But they couldn’t bring another run in until the fourth, when Rodriguez drove in Luna from second base with an RBI single to right field. Contreras led the offense with a home run, an RBI and a run, while Rodriguez had a hit and an RBI, Luna had a hit and a run, Koishor had two hits and Scoles had a hit. Jill Johnson took the loss, pitching five innings and allowing nine runs on seven hits, with seven walks and two strikeouts. The Lady Jaguars are 7–3 so far this season, with the Jaguar Classic Tournament beginning this week. Valley Center will play at La Jolla on Wednesday at 4 p.m. before returning home to host Kearney on Friday at 4 p.m. The Lady Jags also play a non-league game at San Pasqual on Saturday at 9 a.m.
The beginning of a new year can serve as a reminder of the ever-changing nature of our world. The old is gone, the new has come. And so many of us take this opportunity to take stock in our lives; to re-evaluate what’s important, to learn from the experiences of the past year, and, if possible, to make plans for improvement in the year to come. This is not what I will be doing this year. Operating under the assumption that I’m pretty great already, I’ve decided that the world should be making resolutions to make my life better. Specifically, I’ve decided that the sports world should make a few changes. A couple of years ago, I wrote a list of sports-related resolutions that I wanted to implement. I wanted to watch more games (which I’ve done), go to more games in person (also done), ...root for a team over an individual (sorry, Miami Dolphins players, but my fantasy football team did much better without any of you in my starting lineup), wear real eye black (which was confused for mascara by a scorekeeper in my coed softball league last year) ...and in general, have more fun with sports. After months of introspection (or five minutes watching Sportscenter), it became clear that A) I’m pulling my weight around here, and B) the sports world is not. So what should the world of sports do to better appease me? I’m glad you asked.
1. Quality Over Quantity
512. 4,860. 2,460. Another 2,460. 36. Add those all together and you get 10,328. That’s how many major sports competitions are held every year, just in the regular season. 512 NFL games, 4,860 MLB games, 2,460 games in both the NBA and NHL, and 36 NASCAR races. If we say that the average length of each of these contests is around three hours, that’s 30,984 hours of major sports action every single year. There are only 8,766 hours in a year, so since many of these games are going on simultaneously, the number will be higher. But my goodness, 30,984 hours of sports? I’m a big sports fan, but even that seems like a little bit too much time. Some games are fantastic, and more than worth the three-ish hours we put in. Others involve the Milwaukee Brewers, and shouldn’t be shown to small children. I’ve written before about how the NFL has it right—one game per team per week, 16 games in the regular season, three weeks of playoffs, then the Super Bowl. Just enough to keep us interested, but not too much that we get bored. Because let’s face it, Americans get bored really easily. What used to be called multitasking a few years ago is now just called “tasking.” We watch TV while we eat. We talk on the phone while we drive (um… with a hands-free device, of course). We watch more TV while we… um… sleep. I’m just as guilty as the next person. In our home, my wife and I have three TVs (one of which looks like this), ...four video game systems, two computers and three cell phones, two of which are “smart” phones. Not counting my collection of old Hardy Boys books (I’m a sucker for kitsch), our DVD collection outnumbers our book collection (not as much as it used to before I got married, at least). I recently chuckled to myself as I noticed another person watching TV, listening to an MP3 player and playing Mario Kart on the computer, all at the same time. Needless to say, we live in a country that takes sensory input to levels never before imagined. But as we discussed in the NFL-has-it-right column, more is definitely not always better. Baseball is fun to watch, but it’s easy to lose interest in a team when you can’t watch 162 games. Same with the NBA, NHL and NASCAR (as much as I love NASCAR, it’s just too long of a season). And now the NFL is talking about an 18-game schedule for next year. Really? I mean, I know football is America’s current pastime, but as ESPN.com writer Gregg Easterbrook consistently reminds us, there is no law that says football has to remain popular. I know it’s a lot to ask, but I think the sports world owes us less quantity and more quality. If it means contracting a few teams in the NBA and NHL and scaling back to 40 games or so (from December through March or something like that), then let’s do it. If it means only playing baseball in the summer (the horror!) instead of spring-to-winter, then let’s whittle the schedule down to June, July and August, with the playoffs in September. If it means only running NASCAR races from February through August, so as not to overlap the NFL, I’m all for it. Basically, I want to be able to enjoy the sports I get to watch. I want games to mean something. I want each sport to have its own season of the year, with the exception of basketball, which is boring and should be ignored while we watch hockey. I want sports to be worth watching in the 8,766 hours I have this year.
2. More Football!
I know, this one seems to contradict the last one, but really, when you think about it… OK so it contradicts the last one. This is my wish list so I can contradict whatever I want. I know it’s a long shot, but I’d really like to see steps toward the implementation of a Minor League Football system. I outlined this idea in depth back in August—basically, you take the 32 NFL teams, give each of them a minor league affiliate in a nearby city, and have the minor league team supplement the NFL team’s roster when necessary. Wow, that was much easier to explain this time around. Makes me wonder why I needed 1,100 words to discuss it last time around. I guess it was to talk about the details of how it would work, not to mention to suggest some fun names for the minor league affiliates (admit it, you’d go see a team called the Escondido Spark Plugs or the Fort Lauderdale Manatees). This time, I’d like to focus on how it would make being a sports fan better. We all like football, because this is America, and if you don’t, well… you might be a communist. Just saying. So how could more football not be a good idea? The risk, as we touched on in the last section, is over-saturation. Too much football could make it seem ho-hum and watered-down. But the potential reward is intriguing. If each NFL team had a farm team it could use to groom young players, the quality of play in the NFL would go up because young players would get more game experience in the minor league before getting shoved into NFL action. Players who were stars in college would get to quickly show whether or not they belong in the big leagues, while scrappy players who weren’t highly drafted would have more shots to show how their hard work has paid off. And it would even give players returning from injury a chance to play a real game as a bit of a warm-up to coming back to the NFL. From a fan’s perspective, Minor League Football would give us more opportunities to watch professional-caliber football, play more (or different types of) fantasy football, buy more gear, attend more games (hopefully with the fun-first atmosphere of Minor League Baseball) and see more young players play in real games.
3. Cleaning House
If the world of sports really wants to appease the fans, the key is quality. And the best way to ensure that a quality product hits the field, court, rink or track is by increasing the level of competition while limiting the number of spots available to elite athletes. In the case of professional sports, I really like the format of the English Premiere League, in which soccer teams are relegated to a lower league if they finish in the bottom four spots in the standings at the end of the season. For the four major American sports, this would mean splitting the leagues into two levels and allowing only the teams in the top level to compete for the major league championship. In the case of the NFL, if we were to take the top 16 teams in the league (by record) and split them in half, we could separate the teams who are good from the teams who are not. We would have good teams facing good teams on a regular basis, and we wouldn’t have to sit through blowouts like we saw between the Steelers and the Browns on Sunday. Seriously, Cleveland? 41–9? Is that whole LeBron thing still getting to you? Some might argue that this idea is flawed because we would still have to watch games like the Cardinals against the 49ers. That is true; terrible teams would still be terrible. We can’t get around that. But at least the terrible teams would only be playing other terrible teams, and they would be playing for some sort of second-rate championship, not to mention the chance to move up to the big leagues and play for the real title. If we don’t get relegation, I’d at least like to see some form of contraction, especially in the NHL. I really like hockey, but there are 30 teams in the NHL, and I don’t think I can name more than one or two players on most of them anymore. And that’s kind of a shame since hockey names are pretty much the best. Where else can you find a guy named Guillaume Latendresse or Georges Laraque or Radek Bonk? Probably not even in the NHL anymore since it’s pretty well impossible to find a hockey game on TV these days. But if the league went back to 15 teams (half of its current number)—preferably in the colder regions of North America— to consolidate talent, then slashed the schedule down to one or two games per team per week, it would make each game more important and full of better talent. And that’s the goal of this whole thing—more important games with more talent.
4. More Gus Johnson
Pro sports commentators are a dying breed. Well, we’re losing most of the good ones, anyway. Pat Summerall was an icon. Keith Jackson made a highlight out of introducing the starting lineups. Dick Enberg and his trademark “Oh my!” provided so many great moments. Bob Papa and Matt Millen, however, do not fall into this category. The NFL Network commentators are just two of the host of insufferable game callers who are increasingly harder to stomach. They all use too many clichéd catchphrases (“When you talk about the Chargers, you talk about a team that really plays well in December.”), too many incorrect words (it’s not, “They’re having a tough time figuring out how to defense the pass,” the correct phrase is, “They’re having a tough time figuring out how to defend the pass.” Don’t try to get all fancy on us.), and too many weird versions of common phrases that nobody else seems to be using (as in, when did “hand-eye coordination” become “eye-hand coordination?”). At least we have Gus Johnson.
The CBS play-by-play guy has developed a reputation this season for calling the NFL games with the most thrilling finishes. He called the Jaguars/Texans game that ended with a Hail Mary touchdown on the final play and inspired ESPN.com writer Bill Simmons to incorporate Johnson into his many theories about how to predict the winner in NFL games. He’s even the commentator on Madden 11, which is a huge upgrade from Tom Hammond in the 2010 version of the game. If we cut back on the length of the various sports’ seasons, then we can get Johnson calling games year round. And if that doesn’t make sports more enjoyable, then I don’t know what will. But maybe you do. If you have any ideas about what the sports world can do to make 2011 better for us, the fans, send them to me at sports@valleycenter.com and I’ll share them with our readers. You can send an itemized list, a couple of ideas, or just random scribblings on a napkin. Whatever you’ve got, send it in and we’ll do our best to make 2011 a great year for sports.
For those of you who watched the CIF Division IV football championship at the end of last season, you'll remember (painfully, if you're a Valley Center fan) that Mission Bay's Dillon Baxter ran roughshod through the muddied Jaguar defense for upwards of 400 yards.
At the time, I remember thinking that this kid was a prodigious talent, but I couldn't help but notice that his attitude seemed...a bit off.
For example, before the game started, both teams were out on the field warming up, each team on its own half. Baxter managed to situate himself right at the 50 yard line, closer to the Valley Center sideline than his own, and lo and behold, ended up in a bit of a jawing match with some of the Jaguars.
During the game, despite the fact that he was running around the field like a grown-up on the playground field with a bunch of kids, Baxter's teammates all but ignored their star on the sideline. Perhaps he purposely stood by himself, perhaps his teammates just didn't want to talk to him, perhaps it was a little of both. But it was in sharp contrast to Valley Center's recently-graduated phenom, James Johnson, who was always pumping up his teammates with encouragement, cheering on the team during the brief moments when he wasn't in the game, and talking with coaches about the game plan. Baxter seemed like he was already finished with Mission Bay (a theory supported by the USC beanie he was wearing after the game, which I noticed only after he was the absolute last player to go through the line to shake hands with the Jaguars).
He was pretty highly touted coming out of high school, and USC landed him. But this week, after a few disappointing efforts, this report came out on ESPN.com about Baxter's lack of effort.
He may be superbly talented, but as Johnson has shown at the University of Washington (earning a starting WR spot as a true freshman, but having been slowed by an ankle injury in his sophomore year) that hard work is what separates the great from the pretty good.
The Valley Center varsity girls golf team got its first win of the season last week, as the Lady Jaguars struggled out of the gate this season but are improving with each match. The Lady Jags are 1–1 in league after a victory over Orange Glen in a tri-meet that also included Oceanside this week. In the match, the Lady Jaguars shot their lowest score of the season, a 304, last Monday at Woods Valley Golf Course. Kaley Prudham led Valley Center with a 53, while Hannah Johnson shot a 59, Megan Ennis, Jil Johnson and Haley Stone each shot a 64, and Taylor Bibby shot a 77. Overall, the Lady Jags are 1–10 this season, but the team and individual scores keep getting lower. “We got off to a rocky start, but we’re getting better as a team,” head coach Shandrea Degen said. “We have improved our overall team scores over the past couple of weeks and the girls continue to get better. With such a new team that is all I can ask for right now. Our team goal this week is getting below 300 for 5 scores. Considering our first few team scores were 321, we have shown great improvement.” Most recently, the Lady Jags played at Canyon Crest last Tuesday, posting another team best score for a second consecutive round with 304, but took the loss with Canyon Crest shooting a 229. For Valley Center, Prudham led the way with a 43, while Jil Johnson shot a 51, Ashley Williams shot a 64, Ennis shot a 72, Bibby shot a 74 and Hannah Johnson shot a 76. On Sept. 23, the Lady Jags took on Fallbrook at the Fallbrook Golf Course, but took the loss, 242–320. Prudham posted a 54 to lead the Lady Jaguars, while Hannah Johnson shot a 59, Jil Johnson shot a 65, Stone shot a 69, Ennis shot a 73 and Williams shot a 76. The day before, Valley Center hosted Horizon at Woods Valley Golf Course and suffered a 291–315 loss. Prudham once again led the Lady Jags with a 53, while Ennis shot a 56, Hannah Johnson shot a 67, Bibby shot a 68, Williams shot a 71 and Stone shot a 74. On Sept. 20, the Lady Jags took on Escondido at Woods Valley, and couldn’t match the Lady Cougars in a 266–321 loss. Prudham had a nice round with a 56, while Ennis shot a 60, Hannah Johnson and Stone both shot a 67, Bibby shot a 71 and Williams shot a 79.
Heading into his sophomore year at the University of Washington, Valley Center High School graduate James Johnson has plenty to be excited about this football season. Johnson was named The Roadrunner’s Newsmaker of the Year in 2008 after a stellar senior season at VCHS, in which he caught 57 passes for 1,261 yards and 17 touchdowns. As a Jaguar, Johnson broke the CIF San Diego Section record for most receiving yards in a high school career with 2,930 in four years as a varsity starter. In his first season with the Huskies, Johnson made 39 receptions for 422 yards and three touchdowns, including a 17-yard touchdown on his first collegiate reception. He also helped Washington to a thrilling 16-13 win over No. 3-ranked USC last season by hauling in seven catches for 72 yards, and was named to the All-Pac 10 Freshman team for his outstanding first season. This year, Johnson says he learned a lot from his freshman season, and that it has helped him gain a deeper understanding of the game. “I’ve learned a lot about the business aspect of the game,” he says. “What I mean by that is that I see the way the coaches constantly stress competition at each position to make everyone better. In college, everyone’s much more equal that way. And you have to have a lot more mental toughness at this level—a lot more than in high school.” Along with the mental toughness, Johnson will need physical toughness to bounce back from an ankle injury that kept him out of preseason mini camps, and allowed him to return to practice only recently. “I missed a couple of weeks; it was a pretty bad strain,” he says. “But I’m back at practice and getting back in the mix of things, trying to get back to one hundred percent.” Even though he’s not sure he’ll be fully healed in time for this Saturday’s game at Brigham Young University (BYU), Johnson says he’s looking forward to how the team is coming together this season. “I’m really excited about our team chemistry this year,” he says. “We have a real sense of camaraderie that’s better than it was last year. We only won five games last season, but I can tell we’re going to win a lot more than that this year.” One reason the Huskies are looking so good heading into the season is senior quarterback Jake Locker, who threw for 2,800 yards and 21 touchdowns last season, and is an extremely likely candidate to become the No. 1 overall pick in next year’s NFL draft. “It’s just a blessing from God to be able to play with a guy like Jake,” Johnson says of his quarterback. “He’s a great guy on and off the field, he’s always studying the game, and he’s a tremendous leader. It’s a great opportunity for me as a wide receiver to play with such a great quarterback.” And even as the college football season gets underway this weekend, Johnson hasn’t forgotten the Jaguars and their upcoming season opener on Friday night. “I would just tell them to enjoy the game and have fun out there,” he says about the Jaguars. “You only get to be in high school once, so take advantage of the time you have there. I love being here in Washington, but I miss Valley Center too. There’s nothing like those Friday nights out there on the football field.” Johnson and the Huskies start the season on Saturday at BYU at 4 p.m. PST. Two of Washington’s games are scheduled to be televised nationally: a home game against No. 3 Nebraska on Sept. 18 is set to be shown on ABC at 12:30 p.m. PST, then the Huskies’ home game against UCLA on Nov. 18 will be shown on ESPN and online on ESPN3.com at 5 p.m. PST.
Freshman wideout and Valley Center alum James Johnson (No. 3 in the above photo) is at it again, earning a starting spot for the Washington Huskies in their season opener against Louisiana State (LSU) on Saturday.
Johnson told me he's "excited" about the opportunity, and that he's been preparing for this "since I got off the plane." As always, he sounded cool and confident when I talked to him on Monday, but I imagine there will be a few butterflies when Saturday evening rolls around. Not that it will affect how he plays, because in all the big games he played at Valley Center, he always seemed to step up the biggest when the pressure was at its greatest.
Be sure to watch the Huskies play the LSU Tigers on Saturday at 7:30 pm PST. The game will be shown on ESPN and online on ESPN 360.
Valley Center High School grad James Johnson is already wowing the coaches (and the media) at the University of Washington.
Check out this article from the Seattle Times about Johnson's first practice, in which he caught three touchdowns, including one in some heavy traffic.
I sent a quick text message to James this week, and he says he's working hard, and I know I'm looking forward to the season. I'm hoping to talk with him a bit this weekend to see how life in college football is going so far...so check back in later this week and make sure to pick up a copy of The Roadrunner.
Jasmine Contreras smashes a home run against Westview.
Anna Luna rips this pitch for a hit.
