Latest news with #MarinaHighSchool
Los Angeles Times
3 days ago
- Sport
- Los Angeles Times
Marina Vikings celebrate the Class of 2025
The Marina High School choir club sang 'Seasons of Love' during the Vikings' commencement ceremony on Thursday at Boswell Field in Westminster. One season is over for the Class of 2025, and another will be beginning. Marina graduated 498 seniors during the ceremony. Janai Brown was the Vikings' senior speaker, while Joshua Chang White, who graduated summa cum laude, also addressed his classmates and invited guests. Sarah Davis performed the national anthem. Tim Floyd concluded his first year as Marina principal this year, and the Vikings had another year of academic and athletic success. Notably, the boys' tennis team advanced to its first CIF title match in program history. Senior Trevor Nguyen, bound for UC San Diego, was the Vikings' No. 1 singles player and again formed an elite doubles team wth junior David Tran. The squad also had four other senior starters who graduated Thursday, including Darren Le and Justin Nguyen, who will room together at UCLA in the fall. — Daily Pilot Staff
CBS News
5 days ago
- Sport
- CBS News
Valkyries Coach Natalie Nakase talks about her Southern California roots
Long before becoming the Golden State Valkyries head coach, Natalie Nakase was already spending most of her time on the court. She could be found at an Orange County basketball court on any given night in the 1980s. She and her sisters took score during their father's Japanese American pickup basketball games. Gary Nakase co-founded the league. He would take his three daughters with him to make sure they were learning the sport analytically. Natalie Nakase and her father, Gary Nakase, would often spend time on basketball courts together. Natalie Nakase "My mom said, 'If you go play basketball two times a week, you're taking the three little girls,'" Nakase told CBS News Bay Area in a sit-down interview. Basketball was life for the Nakase family. No sleepovers, no vacations. The sport was the priority. "I thought that was my normal childhood," she said. "Now I look, and he was training me for this moment." Nakase is the first Asian American WNBA coach, but before even entering the world of coaching, she was a great basketball player. Her older sisters, Nicola and Norie, played at Marina High School in Huntington Beach. Nicola had graduated by the time Natalie was entering as a freshman. Norie was set to be a senior, but it looked unlikely that they would play together based on a rule head coach Pete Bonny had. "He thought there was no way I was going to make varsity," Nakase said. "He said, 'I don't put freshman on varsity.'" More than 25 years after he coached his final game there, Bonny strolled into Marina High School on a Sunday afternoon before the Valkyries faced the Los Angeles Sparks. He looked around the gym, locating the banners with the many accolades he won there. He coached at Marina High for a decade, racking up six league titles. A demanding coach, he wasn't sold on a player he had never seen despite the rave reviews he was hearing about her in 1995. "Everyone said, 'You're getting this really great point guard.' And I thought, 'I'll believe it when I see it,'" Bonny said. It didn't take long for him to realize what he had in the youngest Nakase. During a June practice well before the school year began, he lined up the returning varsity players on one court and the incoming freshman team on another. As Nakase remembers, she didn't even last a single hour with the other freshmen. "I think I spent 30 minutes on the JV court, and he was like, 'OK, let's see it,'" Nakase said. Bonny was sold. "I watched for about 45 seconds and I said, 'Number 11, you're going to be on this side for the next four years,'" he said. Making the varsity squad was the easiest part of her four years at Marina High School. Bonny pushed Nakase to her limits, making practices tougher than games. "My high school coaches were tough," she said. "We played up-tempo basketball. If we didn't play hard and with pace, we would get yelled at. We had a lot of victories because of the practices we had." All of that hard work paid off in 1998. Marina High School won its first CIF Section Title in program history, and Nakase was named the County Player of the Year by the Los Angeles Times and Orange County Register. Natalie Nakase with the 1998 Lady Vikings after winning the CIF Section Title. Pete Bonny "It was all about winning championships," she said. "I'd rather win and not be an All Star or MVP, that meant more." When asked about her importance to the 1998 team, Bonny couldn't help but laugh. "That was really the epitome of a team," he said. "She was the choreographer. Defensively, she told people what to do, and offensively, she put people in their place. The 5-foot-1 point guard left Marina as the all-time leader in career assists, steals and three-point shots made. She walked on at UCLA and started three years and then played pro ball. Eventually, she felt a calling to coaching. It didn't take long before she recognized Bonny in herself. "Him giving up his time, I think that has impacted me," she said. "I love giving my time on the court to the players. I would say I'm a mirror image of him." Many of the lessons learned from Bonny helped her score opportunities with the Los Angeles Clippers and then later in the WNBA, where she was an assistant with the Las Vegas Aces. Before the Valkyries came calling, Nakase and Bonny reunited inside that Marina High gym in 2024, when the school retired her number. She became the first girls' basketball player to be honored in that way. "There've been a lot of great players throughout the years, but as far as basketball, when you think of Marina High School girls' basketball, that's kind of one of the first names that jumps out," Bonny said of Nakase. She continues to represent her roots, now on a national stage. While she's busy living out her dream in the Bay Area, she has acted as a hero to many in Southern California who look up to her. "I would have never thought that going after my passion and doing it as a job would ever inspire people," Nakase said. "It means the world that I can impact someone by just following my passion."
Los Angeles Times
11-02-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Huntington Beach City Atty. Michael Gates takes position with Trump's U.S. Department of Justice
Huntington Beach City Atty. Michael Gates, who has done battle with the state of California over myriad issues in recent years, now finds himself headed to Washington, D.C. Gates announced Monday he is resigning to take a job with the United States Department of Justice as a deputy assistant attorney general, in the civil rights division. 'The voters put Trump in office to restore a lot of what has been damaged across the country,' Gates said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times on Monday, adding that he has been an 'unapologetic supporter' of the president since 2015. 'I'm glad to take a role as being a part of that restoration — that we need to put America back to where it was ... a nation of laws.' Gates, 49, stated in a news release that serving the city he grew up in (he played football and wrestled when a student at Marina High School) has been a pleasure since he was first elected city attorney in 2014. Gates was reelected in 2018 then again in 2022, beating out Scott Field, a former employee who won a $2.5 million age discrimination lawsuit against the city. Gates, a Republican, has been battling with Democrat state leaders in Sacramento in recent years over voter identification, housing mandates and other issues. 'In March of 2023, the state demanded the court order the city to immediately adopt a housing element packed with state [Regional Housing Needs Assn.] mandates that would destroy our city,' Gates said in Monday's announcement. 'As of today, nearly two full years later, the state has not accomplished anything from its lawsuit that it set out to do. Nothing. We are winning. The fight, although long from over, is worth it. As I have told many, you cannot win if you never take up the fight.' Judges haven't always agreed with his arguments that Huntington Beach's charter city status gave it authority to cast aside state mandates, however. Gates also said in the release that he will recommend to the City Council that it hire longtime chief assistant City Atty. Mike Vigliotta as his replacement. The position is up for reelection in 2026. Vigliotta left in 2023 to be the city attorney for the city of Orange. '[Vigliotta] will be the perfect replacement to carry the city's legal battles forward, including continuing with the city's voter ID law, the high-density housing fights and the city's important legal battle over the state's sanctuary law,' Gates said. Gates was a lightning rod at times, beloved by many in the city's conservative population and critiqued by many others. He drew criticism from some when he declined to release the full multimillion-dollar settlement with Pacific Airshow LLC, following the cancellation of the final day of the 2021 show due to an oil spill off the coast. Gates said he wouldn't reveal the full deal due to possible litigation with oil pipeline operator Amplify Energy, which the city settled with prior to litigation last fall. Huntington Beach resident and Ocean View School District trustee Gina Clayton-Tarvin successfully sued the city to get the full settlement released. An audit of the settlement was ordered by the state California Joint Legislative Audit Committee last May, but state auditor Grant Parks sued the city months later for failing to comply. Clayton-Tarvin said Monday that she believed that Gates has been pandering to right-wing causes and to Trump specifically in recent months. She accused him of 'wasting our tax dollars on political folly so that he could get himself noticed by the Trump Administration. 'Many people could see it, but due to the hyper-partisanship in Huntington Beach, some people chose not to see it like that,' she said. 'They saw it as, 'Oh great, he's going after immigrants, or the LGBT community, or these groups that we don't like' ... Michael Gates was their kind of great white knight.' Gates said in the release that his absence doesn't mean that Huntington Beach will stop battling Sacramento. 'Huntington Beach will continue to fight aggressively, and the city will ultimately prevail,' he said. 'The law is on the city's side, and while it may take time in the courts, I have every faith that the city will ultimately be vindicated by the law.'
