Sea Kings add more CIF banners

Corona del Mar High has a rule about banners.

Only athletic championship banners won in the CIF Southern Section or CIF State get hung up in the gym. There are a couple of national ones, not associated with the CIF.

As for CIF banners recognizing academics, CdM athletic director Paul Orris has the perfect place for them.

“I give those banners for the coaches to put up in their classrooms,” Orris said. “Plus, we have 99 banners in the gym and we’re running out of room.”

Three CdM sports teams earned credit for their academic excellence after winning the CIF Southern Section Team Academic Awards.

The awards go to the team with highest cumulative grade-point average in each sport. The girls’ track and field team (3.794), girls’ water polo team (3.660) and baseball team (3.630) at CdM placed first.

The girls’ golf team will receive a $250 grant from the Women’s Southern California Golf Assn. for finishing with the second-highest GPA (3.638) in the small schools category.

The teams will be honored during a pre-game ceremony at Angel Stadium before the Angels play the Detroit Tigers on April 22. CdM baseball coach John Emme has been to the ballpark before.

This is his second trip in the last three seasons because of his team. This means a lot more to Emme than the actual baseball game.

“The NCAA commercial says most of us will be professionals in something other than sports and the message is so true,” said Emme, who teaches English, sociology and psychology at CdM.

In his classroom, Emme said he already has two banners up, the section and state academic honors won in the 2006-07 school year. The prize ranks just as high as the two section championships he managed to win in baseball in 1999 and 2004.

Emme said the seniors on the baseball team with the highest GPA, above 4.0, are first baseman Danny Moskovits and pitcher Matt Morris, who are headed to Harvard and Duke, respectively.

Aaron Chaney, the girls’ water polo coach, said he has six or seven girls with a GPA at 4.0 or higher.

Chaney said Elise Molnar is the senior with the highest GPA at 4.5. She’s headed to Harvard.

The Sea Kings finished runner-up in the CIF Southern Section Division I championship in February and won the Masters Tournament in March. The team achieved the same type of success in the classroom.

“It’s amazing that we practice as has hard and as often as we do and they keep up with their schoolwork,” said Chaney, adding the team was honored by the section a couple of years ago as well. “All 10 seniors are going to [college]. Eight will continue playing water polo at those schools.”

Orris said this kind of achievement says a lot about the school, its teachers, students and their families. The section said 1,328 team entries were submitted into the competition.

“It speaks of the quality of the product our school produces academically and athletically,” said Orris, in his third year as athletic director. “The parents give us a great deal of support and encourage them to be involved with a variety of activities.

“When I was coaching [boys’ basketball], I didn’t necessarily have the best athletes, we had pretty good athletes, who also could think, and that combination helped us go a long way [as we won two section titles and placed second three times from 1986-2001]. You can get a lot of mileage out of athletes who play hard and analyze what’s going on and try to maximize their potential.”

DAVID CARRILLO PEÑALOZA may be reached at (714) 966-4612 or at [email protected].