Taking a look around Orange County high school sports: •Orange Lutheran will play Pickerington Central of Ohio in the Kirk Herbstreit Varsity Football Series
on Aug. 30, part of a two-day, four-game event at Ohio Stadium in Columbus. Pickerington Central was 13-1 last year when it reached the state Division I semifinals, and Orange Lutheran was 10-3 and lost to Tesoro in the CIF-SS Division I semifinals. The Pickerington Central-OLu game will be televised live by ESPNU. •Washington is the latest school to offer a scholarship to La Habra football player Josh Quezada, who was an All-County first-team running back as a junior last year but could have been a selection on the All-County defensive team, too. I was never sure if Quezada was a linebacker or safety last year, because he’s so quick it was difficult to tell where his point of origin was on the field. Safety might be his collegiate destination. •The appointment of Frank Talarico as first president at JSerra moves him away from Servite, his alma mater where he was vice president of advance for several years, a position that sometimes required him to write press releases. Still at the Servite Web site under “press releases” can be found the Talarico-composed release of Feb. 22, 2005, that announces pointedly and entertainingly the decision of John Barnes to remain at Los Alamitos instead of taking the Servite football coaching position that Barnes had accepted earlier that day: “After signing his contract, meeting with the faculty and staff of Servite High School, taking a tour of the campus with his wife and son Jimmy, and spending thirty minutes with his future football team mapping out his strategy and philosophy, John Barnes has decided he is unable to accept the position of head football coach for Servite High School.” •Of course, the Servite-Barnes story had a happy ending for all. Barnes remained at Los Alamitos, where he is content and consistently expanding his county-record victories total, and Troy Thomas went to Servite, which has undergone a football revival. In the years since, Los Alamitos is 31-12 overall and 0-3 in the playoffs, and Servite is 34-14 overall and 5-4 in the playoffs. •The Register/ocvarsity.com baseball preseason top 10: 1. El Toro 2. Mater Dei 3. Capistrano Valley 4. Los Alamitos 5. Marina 6. Dana Hills 7. JSerra 8. Orange Lutheran 9. Tesoro 10. Edison. The final media poll top 10: 1. El Toro 2. JSerra 3. Edison 4. Mater Dei 5. Capistrano Valley 6. Marina 7. Tesoro 8. Foothill 9. Esperanza 10. Pacifica. Dana Hills and Orange Lutheran are in the second round of the Division I playoffs, but we really missed on Los Alamitos, which had a lot of new players at key positions and finished fourth in the Sunset League. •The Register/ocvarsity.com softball preseason top 10: 1. Canyon 2. Mater Dei 3. Marina 4. Trabuco Hills 5. Rosary 6. Los Alamitos 7. Beckman 8. Esperanza 9. El Modena 10. El Toro. The final regular-season top 10: 1. Mater Dei 2. Canyon 3. El Modena 4. Edison 5. Los Alamitos 6. Marina 7. Beckman 8. Foothill 9. Laguna Hills 10. Aliso Niguel. Not too bad, either. Rosary did finish second in the Trinity League, and Esperanza played in a Division I second-round game Tuesday.
•Seeding and final league standing have nothing to do with the selection of home teams in the playoffs after the first round. Following a rule proposed and approved by CIF-SS member schools, when two teams meet in the playoffs after the first round the team with the fewest number of home games to that point of the playoffs is the home team. If they have had an equal number of home playoff games, a coin flip determines the home team.