Prep talk: Southland natives selected for USA national softball team
Southern California is a hotbed for softball talent, so it comes as no surprise that the USA national team's 15-person roster for the World Games in Chengdu, China, is loaded with local products.
Players either went to high school locally or played for UCLA.
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They include Oaks Christian and UCLA standout Maya Brady and St. Anthony and Oklahoma star Tiare Jennings. There's Rachel Garcia from Highland and UCLA. Amanda Lorenz was a star at Moorpark and Florida.
Kinzie Hansen went to Norco and Oklahoma. It's a who's who of players who have been great in youth softball and college softball. …
The Southern Section released its boys'volleyball and lacrosse playoff pairings. Here's the link for volleyball. Here's boys' lacrosse. Here's girls' lacrosse.
This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.
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USA Today
4 hours ago
- USA Today
Josh Pate isn't sleeping on Oklahoma's John Mateer
Josh Pate isn't sleeping on Oklahoma's John Mateer The Oklahoma Sooners made a major upgrade at starting quarterback this winter. With former starter Jackson Arnold off to play for the Auburn Tigers, OU had a hole to fill under center. Not only did they fill it, they did so with a player, John Mateer, who is better than any QB the Sooners had on the roster a year ago. In fact, Mateer was the transfer portal's top overall player this year. Oklahoma beat out Miami and North Carolina to land the former Washington State star. After OU was atrocious offensively in 2024, Mateer's arrival gives the Sooners a chance to rebound back to their winning ways in 2025. At least that's what Josh Pate, the host of "Josh Pate's College Football Show", thinks. Because of familiarity with his play-caller and the help of players from multiple top-ten recruiting classes over the past few years, he has Mateer right alongside the best quarterbacks in the entire SEC. "I'm putting John Mateer in the top five," Pate said. "If I'm right, Oklahoma's gonna be a contender in the SEC. I believe in the OC-quarterback approach, bringing both of them in, not just one of them, especially when they're both qualified, and Ben Arbuckle and John Mateer are. I also think it greatly helps that John Mateer is not being brought into Norman, Oklahoma, and then being looked at by everyone down on their knees with their hands clasped praying, 'Please save us John, save us.' No, you don't need to save anyone. You need to go in there and play solid football and execute, make good decisions, because you know what you've got around you? You've got a top-ten roster around you. You've got a really good defense. You don't have to score 42 a game to win, and you've got guys calling plays for you that you're very familiar with. I think he's gonna be really good this year. That's why I've got Oklahoma top ten in the preseason." Sooner Nation has long clamored for complementary football in Norman. For years, OU fans had to watch incredible offenses, led by Heisman Trophy-level quarterbacks, be ultimately let down by bad defenses. The trio of Baker Mayfield, Kyler Murray and Jalen Hurts combined for four College Football Playoff appearances in five seasons from 2015 to 2019, and it was the inability to get stops on defense that, for the most part, sunk those excellent Oklahoma teams in the semifinal round each time. When Brent Venables took over for Lincoln Riley, the hope was that he could change that. In the years since, Venables has built up a defense that looks like it can compete in the SEC. But, just as the defense was getting really good in 2024, Oklahoma's offense fell off a cliff with Seth Littrell and Jackson Arnold at the helm. Complementary football eluded OU yet again. With plenty of returning starters, the Oklahoma defense looks like it has the pieces to be good again. On the other side of the ball, the Arbuckle-Mateer combination hopes to finally bring high-level play on both offense and defense, at the same time, to Norman in 2025. Contact/Follow us @SoonersWire on X, and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Oklahoma news, notes, and opinions. You can also follow Aaron on X @Aaron_Gelvin.
New York Times
4 hours ago
- New York Times
The Thunder are now even with the Pacers. Time for the NBA Finals panic meter!
The Bounce Newsletter | This is The Athletic's daily NBA newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Bounce directly in your inbox. Three significant events happened on this date. In 1980, the Celtics set themselves up for immense success by trading the No. 1 overall pick and Rickey Brown to the Warriors for Robert Parish and the third overall pick. Those picks ended up being a Joe Barry Carroll for Kevin McHale swap. Then, on this date in 1985, a 38-year-old Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was unanimously voted the oldest finals MVP ever after beating the Celtics. In 1987, Magic Johnson mimicked Abdul-Jabbar by beating Boston in Game 4 of the Finals with the 'junior, junior sky hook.' Thunder uninterested in a Pacers comeback It's weird how the Pacers have affected the way we watch a playoff game. As the Thunder built their lead, going up by as many as 22 points in the fourth quarter of Game 2, it didn't totally feel reasonable to count out the Pacers. They were having a miserable game, including not shooting the 3-ball with the same success as Game 1. The Pacers weren't able to replicate their success against the players around Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. And they weren't able to dominate on the boards. Indiana was got swallowed up by everything OKC did on both ends of the floor. Advertisement I'm not sure which moment you decided the lead was safe for the Thunder, but they made sure not to leave any doubt this time. There wouldn't be a furious comeback as the Thunder essentially cruised to a 123-107 victory, but I'm not sure any of this felt like smooth sailing. At the same time, it's the Thunder. They put teams away at a historic pace. Remember, they set the record for most double-digit wins in the NBA this season. If you only went off their double-digit victories, they'd have the third-most wins and still be the No. 1 seed in the West. The Thunder solved a lot of the problems from Game 1: All of this made Gilgeous-Alexander's job easier. He had 34 points on 11-of-21 shooting, and was 11-of-12 from the line. That brings him to 72 points on 25-of-51 shooting through two games, and he's now shot 20 free throws in two games. His point total is the highest by any player in their first two NBA Finals games (the previous record holder? You'll read about him shortly!). SGA also had eight assists. If the Pacers tried to replicate their strategy of eating a bunch of points from the league MVP while shutting everybody else down, they failed. Indiana needs more aggressiveness from Tyrese Haliburton. He was too slow to get going in this game. The Pacers also have to get Pascal Siakam in better position to score. They must generate the same corner looks as they did in Game 1. And you can't have another game in which Obi Toppin has as many shot makes in a game as James Johnson does in 'garbage time.' (That number was one, by the way.) NBA Finals Panic Meter: Indiana clocks in at 🚨🚨 | OKC is at 🚨🚨🚨 Both teams head back to Indianapolis for Game 3 Wednesday. We've got some time to break down where both teams could go from here. Buzzer-beaters are a writer's worst nightmare 🏀 Killing deadlines. What happens when Haliburton or someone else hits a buzzer-beater? Your hard work gets scrapped. 🏀 A dozen. SGA became the 12th NBA player in history to score 3,000 combined points in a season. 🫂 Community. David Aldridge reflects on how shared rebuilds have forged bonds between the Thunder and Oklahoma City. Advertisement 🏀 Steps forward. Rick Carlisle and Haliburton needed to evolve. That's how they made the NBA Finals. 🇨🇦 Friend or foe. When you reach the Finals, friendships don't matter. Just ask SGA and Andrew Nembhard. 🎧 Tuning in. Today's 'NBA Daily' discusses how the league has made a mess of displaying the Larry O'Brien trophy during broadcasts. The story of the greatest players in NBA history. In 100 riveting profiles, top basketball writers justify their selections and uncover the history of the NBA in the process. The story of the greatest players in NBA history. Celebrating Don Nelson as an all-time coach Prior to Game 2 in OKC, the NBA managed to get a famous face back into the NBA spotlight. Hall of Famer Don Nelson was somehow coerced away from Hawaii, where he has lived for a very long time, to come to the mainland to accept an award. It wasn't just any award, though. He was honored with the Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Basketball Coaches Association. That's how you get Nelson back into the NBA mix, if only for a night. Nelson hadn't left Maui in seven years, according to Joe Vardon's article. And somehow, Rick Carlisle was able to get him to Oklahoma City to accept this award. That's how much Daly meant to NBA coaches, and that's how much Nelson means to the coaching fraternity. Nelson innovated on both ends of the floor. He was a genius in looking ahead of the game, sometimes decades at a time, and forecast where the league was headed. Nelson is second all-time in coaching wins (1,335). He's tied with Daly for 15th on the all-time wins list when it comes to playoff victories (75). Maybe his most famous playoff victories of all came from leading his Warriors squad over his former Mavericks team in the 2007 playoffs. The reason it was significant is because Golden State was an No. 8 seed, and Dallas was a 67-win No. 1 seed, marking one of the biggest upsets ever. Nelson never won a title as a coach. In fact, he never won a conference title. But he'll always be cemented as one of the best coaches we'll ever see. You can thank him for the point-forward idea. Mavericks fans can also thank him for continuing to fuel the fire between them and the front office/ownership. Nelson remarked at his press conference that trading Luka Dončić was a massive mistake by the front office. Advertisement By now, it wouldn't shock me if Nelson is halfway back to Maui as he regales people of Marques Johnson being the first point-forward. Or maybe he wants to talk about creating Run TMC. Or how he used to implore Steve Nash to shoot more. Or Baron Davis to attack that Russian guy under the basket. Whatever it was, Nelson knew the game of basketball like the back of his hand. He likely still does. Allen Iverson turned 50 over the weekend Whenever we discuss players of yesteryear or players today within historic contexts, we get into time travel. What would this player do back in previous eras? What would a player from long ago look like in today's NBA? We fire up the Delorean, gun it to 88 miles per hour, and then just start arguing about players within a historic vacuum. As a Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famer turned 50 years old on Saturday, I had a thought about that. I'm so glad Allen Iverson didn't play in today's NBA. It has nothing to do with the style of today's game and it being 3-point heavy. It has nothing to do with whether or not he could fit in with how analytics are affecting basketball. It has everything to do with how basketball is covered, how it is discussed and how social media affects the culture of the game. Even with the existence of Michael Jordan and his billion-dollar shoe enterprise, it wouldn't be hard to argue that Allen Iverson is the biggest icon in basketball history. That doesn't mean greatest player. That doesn't mean richest or most successful. But when we're talking about cultural influence and how he affected the aesthetics of both the game and the players themselves, Iverson changed the course of history as much as anybody. The braids. The tattoos. The shooting sleeve. The way he dressed for the game. And then, on top of it, the swagger he brought to the court, harmoniously married with the array of moves and innovation of how he attacked individual defenders, traps and double teams. Put Iverson in today's dissecting, loud-mouthed landscape, and I'm not sure how much of an influence he would have been allowed to be. Iverson was iconic, not by carefully manicured effort like we see so many PR-driven personalities today. He was iconic because things would be done his way, and he had the spine to speak his mind when he felt he was being unfairly misrepresented. Iverson's persona seemed to exorcise ghosts of the NBA's past from the conversation, and make everybody live in the present. Blink and you missed him. Sure, his signature move had him carrying the ball. Who cares? It was the greatest show on the court. He crossed up everybody. He dotted your eye with jump shots and crossed your t's and ankles with his brazen disregard for convention. He saw Michael Jordan in front of him as a rookie, and just knew he had to see if he could pull off his famed crossover on the greatest player ever. Iverson wouldn't have been appreciated now how he was then. We would have been told the way he plays isn't right. We would have been told his personality is a PR liability waiting to happen. We would have been told how inefficient his game was. Advertisement Instead, watching and experiencing Iverson when we did ensure his legacy and icon status are forever safe. He was a middle finger to tradition, and yet a celebration of all things that make basketball great. Happy 50th to one of the best to ever do it in any era. It truly was a joy to experience Allen Iverson take over an entire culture Streaming links in this article are provided by partners of The Athletic. Restrictions may apply. The Athletic maintains full editorial independence. Partners have no control over or input into the reporting or editing process and do not review stories before publication.
New York Times
6 hours ago
- New York Times
Thunder, Oklahoma City have reinforced each other through shared rebuilds and flourished
OKLAHOMA CITY — It's quiet at KD's old place. Not empty, mind you. There are people enjoying the burgers and salads and well-made drinks in this restaurant, which is now known as Charleston's, in the Bricktown neighborhood that serves as downtown's major entertainment hub. But there used to be a buzz. A pulsating energy of sorts, every time you walked into this spot. A decade ago, it was called KD's — the vanity gastro project of Kevin Durant, the then-champion of this city. Durant was Oklahoma City's gleaming pride, his 2014 speech accepting the NBA's MVP award in which he was moved to tears discussing his mother, Wanda's, sacrifices, providing a civic iconography. KD = OKC. Advertisement But that seems so long ago. Longer than nine years, anyway. That Thunder team, built at warp speed around Durant and Russell Westbrook and James Harden after the franchise relocated from Seattle in 2008, has been replaced, almost as quickly, by a new, dominant one, led by Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and featuring a defense that attacks opponent dribbles like a shoal of piranhas. This one has its own league MVP in SGA, along with a beguiling rotation of homegrown All-Stars (Jalen Williams), supremely gifted role players (Chet Holmgren, Lu Dort, Cason Wallace) and free agent/acquired imports (Alex Caruso, Isaiah Hartenstein) who've fit right in during a magical season that has the Thunder, after dominating the NBA's regular season with a 68-14 record, back in the NBA Finals, against the Pacers. Thunder 2.0 has quickly become beloved here, with its rabid fans' non-stop, almost desperate chants of 'OKC…OKC…OKC' at home games over 48 minutes surely meant, first, for the team. But, also, maybe, for themselves. To paraphrase the chants of the residents of Whoville in the Dr. Seuss Classic, 'Horton Hears a Who': We are (still) here, we are (still) here, we are (still) here… 'We don't take it for granted,' Holmgren said Saturday. 'We appreciate how loud it gets in here every game. It makes us want to go out there and kind of represent well. I feel like we're an extension of them, and they feel the same way. They kind of expect, they have a certain level of expectation for us, in terms of the way we carry ourselves, the way we kind of go out there and try to execute. Going out there and doing those things doesn't guarantee a win every night, but we know the city's heart is in it, so we kind of have to have our heart in it at the same time.' If that sounds a little college, rah-rah …well, this is kind of a college, rah-rah town. That's not said snidely or condescendingly. There is a symbiosis between this team and its fan base, the resurgence of one feeding the other, without much of the cynicism that permeates pro fan bases elsewhere, who chafe at the astronomical salaries of players and the equally high costs of the infrastructure needed to keep them around. Advertisement 'I always compare it to, like, a small local high school football team being really good, and the city around them kind of gathers around them,' Williams said before Game 1. 'That's how Oklahoma is. But it's (like) that with the whole state. Everywhere we go, I've been met with love since I've been out here. It's a really cool experience. Even the past two years, I'm really happy I get to be a part of two really good teams. I think it just brings the city more and more life. I'm happy that we get to bring that back here.' There are other pro sports teams here, like the Dodgers' Triple-A affiliate, the Oklahoma City Comets. But the Thunder remain the show. 'As superficial as it sounds, you are who your sports teams play,' said former Oklahoma City mayor Mick Cornett, a driving force behind the efforts that persuaded local voters to come out of pocket, time after time, to finance the city's redevelopment. 'When we were playing a Triple-A schedule for pro sports teams, those were our peer cities,' Cornett said. 'In October of 2005, when the Hornets landed (in a temporary relocation after Hurricane Katrina forced them out of New Orleans), it all changed. Suddenly, we were playing Los Angeles and Chicago and Dallas. And we've never really looked back. And I think we've thought of ourselves differently. And then, the brand, today, is largely positive. That has to be because they now connect our city with the positive energy of a basketball team. 'And all of the economic measurements, and all of the data about highly educated young people moving here, all that's great. But that's only hand-in-hand with being an NBA city. Because highly educated young people want to be in a city that's culturally relevant. And having an NBA team makes you culturally relevant to the rest of the world.' The majority of people in and around town agree with this sentiment. Not all, though. Speed — impatience? — seems to always be part of this city, which might seem contradictory to those who don't live here. Few non-natives think of Oklahoma City as 'fast,' in the traditional sense. But the city was created, literally, in a day. Or, days. Advertisement Oklahoma City, as the author Sam Anderson wrote in his detailed history of the city, 'Boom Town,' has an actual birthday: April 22, 1889. That day became known as the Land Run, when what was then called the Unassigned Lands of the then-territory — approximately 2 million acres — were, literally, flung open to the world for anyone to claim as their own. Of course, the lands were anything but 'unassigned,' unless by that you mean 'unassigned to White people,' which is surely what the Indian Appropriations Act of 1889 meant. On that day, settlers from around the world brought all they owned into the Unassigned Lands and staked their claims to it. Anarchy was disguised as progress. 'It was far too many people for the amount of good land available,' Anderson wrote, 'but from the very start, Oklahoma was an idea that far exceeded its reality.' After the territory was colonized, the city had periods of boom and bust, like most U.S. cities. The busts, though, were longer-lasting. Well into the 1990s, the city was desperate for new development. Yet few American cities have grown faster in the last quarter-century. OKC has risen to the 20th-largest U.S. city in the last decade-plus. Twenty-five years ago, there was one hotel in Bricktown. Now, according to Cornett, there are 29. 'Most people here, they wasn't really into basketball like that until we got a team. Now college football, they could talk about that all day,' says the rap artist Jabee, an Oklahoma City native. 'For us, it's bigger than basketball,' he said. 'Oklahoma City is such a unique city when you think about the history and stuff. We aren't looked at as, like, something to do, or a place to be, a place to go. But over time, we've seen it happen. I was in New York at a Disney Store, and this group of people was standing there. They were talking about the Thunder, and they had accents. And I was talking to them, and they were from, like, Switzerland or Sweden, something like that. And I told them I'm from Oklahoma. And they were like, 'We're going to try to make that our visit next year, when we come back.' And that's all from the excitement of seeing what the Thunder bring.' Not only has the city gotten behind the Thunder, but it's continued its longstanding relationship with softball. The Women's College World Series was here this past week, with Texas beating Texas Tech in three games to claim its first national championship in the sport. That tie will extend to 2028, when the city will provide competition venues for both softball and canoe slalom in the Summer Olympics — the bulk of which will be in the host city of Los Angeles, 1,329 miles to the west. Advertisement At the root of this fantastical expansion is a series of one-cent sales-tax packages, known locally as MAPS (Metropolitan Area Projects), that have raised enough money to build the Thunder's current arena, Paycom Center, along with many of the other new buildings downtown, and to also, since 2001, refurbish many of the city's and surrounding counties' public schools. It only took Thunder president Sam Presti six years to rebuild a new juggernaut from the ashes of the old one — a completely new and different type of team than the one that depended almost entirely on Durant's brilliance in the half court and Westbrook's unlimited, fearless hurtling of his body toward the basket. This one certainly centers around Gilgeous-Alexander, but it's much more free-flowing and egalitarian — a lot like the San Antonio teams on which Presti cut his eyeteeth as a young, rising executive in the Spurs' organization. The modern iteration of the city, of course, is not just shaped by its urban renewal, but by the never-healing scar of being subject to the worst domestic terrorist attack in U.S. history — the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995, which killed 168 people. 'When I became mayor, we had a wounded brand,' Cornett said. 'I could see in people's faces, all they could see was the bombing. Outside capital wasn't going to invest in Oklahoma City. They felt sorry for us, but they weren't going to invest money in it.' So Oklahoma City's citizens had to start the ball rolling. Four times since 1993, voters have approved beginning or renewing another version of MAPS, and in 2023, they voted for yet another one-cent tax on top of that over a six-year period that will provide the bulk of the funding for a new, nearly $1 billion arena for the Thunder. That venue will be built across the street from the current arena, on the site of the city's old convention center. Presti would never — ever — discuss his individual role in remaking this team, twice, in less than two decades, into one of the league's best. He will, though, on occasion, discuss how the team fits into the city's firmament. Advertisement 'I think, as a community and as an organization, we've always drawn deeply from the community that we represent, and that supports us,' he told me a few years ago. 'That's very much steeped in, one, gratitude for what you do have, a day-by-day approach, putting one foot in front of the other. And then taking an optimistic approach about trying to influence what happens next. I think that's certainly in the roots of Oklahoma, and it's also very much a part of the organizational mentality we've tried to apply through the best of times and the most difficult of times. But I think when you subscribe yourself to that, in a lot of ways, it's empowering. We're still applying the same things that we did in 2008, and I think that's based on the fact that the city we represent has been the best model for that.' The Thunder had some very lean years after trading Paul George to the Clippers in 2019, the deal that brought SGA to town (and the draft pick that ultimately was used on Williams). Attendance at Paycom dropped, both as a function of a rebuilding team and because of COVID-19. But while it will be some time before the Thunder approach their consecutive sellout streak of 349 straight games, set between 2011 and 2020, new fans are in the building. 'There was a turnover in the fan base during the COVID/rebuild years,' Cornett said. 'We still sold out, but I'm there almost every game, and it's different people now. Maybe the first group were people that had money and were supportive of Oklahoma City and the Chamber of Commerce and all those things. This group seems more about basketball than the loyalty to the city. … this time around, they just captured the basketball fans, who have been created by the team and the franchise. You've now got a generation of young people who've grown up and thought we always had a team.' The roster has been completely turned over since the George trade, which also brought the first of what is now a rash of future first-round picks to town that could help sustain this run for a good long while. This group, while supported strongly (and loudly, of course), is still getting to know the community. 'Russ, KD, James Harden, they used to come out,' Jabee said. 'Russ had a comedy show every year, and he would book me to perform and host. All the players would come and support. When you would go to a party, you'd see a Thunder player.' But there is time, now, for this next generation of Thunder players to settle in even deeper, with its new fans, and see what is possible over the vast horizons. The Thunder are young and have a work ethic that plays especially well here. The future seems limitless, just like it did 15 years ago. Just like it did 136 years ago, when people from all over came to stake their claim in the topography in the middle of a state that was not yet a state, in a place that was inventing itself on the fly. And is still doing so. 'What a crazy way to start a city,' Cornett said. 'To a certain extent, that craziness, the ups and downs, those peaks and valleys, the best and worst of times, it's all a part of our DNA by now.'
