Prep talk: Scholar football athletes to be honored Sunday
More than 75 high school football seniors will be honored on Sunday for their achievements on and off the field at the annual Coastal Chapter of the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame banquet at the Canyon Club in Agoura.
Simi Valley coach Jim Benkert has been working for weeks to gather the top scholar athletes from this fall. Those who have put together high grade-point averages and performed well on the field receive recognition. For the first time, girls' flag football athletes will participate. The areas of Ventura, the San Fernando Valley and Antelope Valley are represented.
There's some well-known athletes on the list, from Rio Mesa quarterback JJ Bittner to Thousand Oaks linebacker Cory McEnroe. Others are North Hollywood running back Omar Muhammad and Calabasas receiver Dylan Hein. Also being honored is former Hart coach Mike Herrington with the Al Wistert Award.
Congratulations to our student athletes at Banning HS for being honored last night by the National Football Foundation. Adrian Guzman, Steven Perez and Kali Sue were recognized for outstanding academics and athletic achievements. @breezepreps @latsondheimer pic.twitter.com/0kltG7FiWi
— Nick Garibay (@CoachGaribayBHS) March 7, 2025
Other chapters in Los Angeles, Pasadena and Riverside will be holding their annual award presentations.
Congratulations to St. Paul RB/LB Joseph Lafferre '25, who was named the National Football Foundation (LA Chapter) Scholar-Athlete of the Year. Awards are based on their record for academic achievement, athletic achievement, leadership, and community service. We are proud of you… pic.twitter.com/XNSu1HViX4
— St. Paul Football (@StPaulHSFB) March 8, 2025
This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.
Sign up for the L.A. Times SoCal high school sports newsletter to get scores, stories and a behind-the-scenes look at what makes prep sports so popular.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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This excerpt from Becoming Caitlin Clark: The Unknown Origin Story of a Modern Basketball Superstar by Howard Megdal is reprinted with the permission of Triumph Books. For more information and to order a copy, please Caitlin Clark broke women's basketball. In the best possible way here. But also, in ways that are deeply confounding to Clark and those around here. Because Sheila Johnson, co-owner of the WNBA's Washington Mystics, appeared on CNN and slammed Time Magazine for featuring Caitlin Clark as its athlete of the year. No, really. That happened. "We read Time Magazine where Caitlin Clark was named Athlete of the Year," Johnson said on Dec. 13. "Why couldn't they have put the whole WNBA on that cover and said the WNBA is the League of the Year because of all the talent that we have? Because when you just keep singling out one player, it creates hard feelings." Where to start? This is, of course, sports. There are winners and losers every year, every day, in individual awards, in team accolades. The concept of fairness dictating any man in sports history being honored as Athlete of the Year simply would not be a matter of even basic debate. But this is part of the calibration problem - there have been, as Johnson correctly noted, "so many talented players who have been unrecognized." There have been, as Risa Isard and Nicole Melton documented in their landmark September 2021 study of race in WNBA coverage by ESPN, CBS Sports, Sports Illustrated and as exhibited in WNBA team and league press releases, a disproportionate number of stories about white players compared to the majority Black makeup of the league during the 2020 season. That study did not, however, include Caitlin Clark, nor does it even study the time period in which Clark has been playing college basketball or in the WNBA. It speaks to a truth that is absolutely accepted by a broad base of experts on the subject - that the WNBA's best players have been undercovered historically, and that overwhelmingly the WNBA's best players, just as a majority of all its players, have been Black. Simple reasoning has been assigned in so many of the loudest, least-illuminating conversations about exactly why Caitlin Clark is so prominent in the larger American sports culture now, and what it means about both what came before her and the future of women's basketball. The more singular the explanation, the less useful it is. Even worse are the simple motivations assigned to those on both sides of this discussion - for reference, a significant number of people, particularly those with the most invested in the space, such as players, coaches and executives, don't even view this discussion as one with "opposing sides." But for many of the harshest critics of Clark, it was easy to hear the undercurrent of fear, that the full appreciation for the women's game had come too late for them, the money which follows such fandom simply not trickling down into the sport's remarkable and compelling past. The WNBA has existed as a safe space for marginalized people for nearly three decades because broader American culture so often ignored it. That tradeoff is felt in ways, large and small, that fill the league's players, coaches, executives and long-tenured fans with ambivalence. Everyone with a stake in the league's success is living in that gray area, and not only is the money too good to approach it any other way, with it the chance to finally see what a fully-vested WNBA looks like, but the momentum is so overwhelming the league and its stakeholders couldn't stop this train if they wished to do so. And for the countless, often anonymous newcomers to the women's basketball space who saw Clark being tested like all rookies but only clocked it through the race of the players in the majority Black league doing it, discounting all the incredible stories and women who created the scaffolding of possibility for Caitlin Clark engendered bitterness, fear and anger. And everyone involved in this oversimplification suffered from a failure not just of understanding the racial, gender, historical and competitive context, but so often a failure to understanding that when Caitlin Clark had opened these doors to the broader audience, it represented a chance for others to follow. Caitlin Clark did it first, but is doing it in a way that is precisely designed for the opposite of Clark existing as a one-off phenomenon. She is a beginning, not a culmination. And none of this means that Caitlin Clark is being overcovered now. 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