Football Teams

The Western State Conference has approved a realignment for schools competing in football that will send Ventura and Moorpark colleges to the Northern Division, joining Glendale, Santa Barbara, Harbor and L. A. Southwest. The Southern Division will comprise Bakersfield, Compton, Pierce, Valley, Santa Monica and West L. A.

Cross-town football rivals will team up next month when players and coaches from three high schools sponsor a carnival aimed at raising money for their cash-strapped programs. The Tri-School Fair will take place June 3-5 and is being organized by football teams from Irvine, Woodbridge and University high schools. The teams are fierce competitors on the field, but boosters said that all three need money.

When team manager Mike Toothman is feeling daring, he tries to draw opposing football teams offside by faking a beat against the large bass drum on the sideline near the line of scrimmage. Sometimes the defense falls for it and is quickly penalized. But since few of the players can hear the officials' whistles, the play is usually completed anyway.

The City Council agreed Tuesday to form a committee to lure a professional football team to Los Angeles and will broaden the panel to include members of other key groups. The council panel, to be known as the Ad Hoc Sports Franchise Committee, also will negotiate for other professional sports teams, according to Council President John Ferraro. The unanimous decision came after the council urged Mayor Richard Riordan to step up his efforts last week. Last year, Riordan formed Football L.A.

Frederic Rosen, the president and chief executive officer of Ticketmaster Corp. and a onetime skeptic about the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum's chances of bringing football back to the city, announced Thursday that he is joining the partnership group in that effort. "Clearly, events have happened that make this project possible," Rosen said in an interview, specifically citing the approval of a downtown sports arena. "When I was asked by the mayor to head Football L.A., I . . .

In the hope of luring a professional football team back to the city, county Supervisor Mike Antonovich said Monday that he hopes NFL owners will take note of the low crime statistics in the Coliseum area during USC's 1997 home games. Trying to distance the Coliseum from its rowdy reputation earned when the National Football League's Raiders played there, Antonovich said that during the recently completed season, only four crimes were recorded at Exposition Park when the Trojans were at home.

"Undefeated" presents itself as a look at a single season in the life of a striving high school football team in impoverished North Memphis, Tenn., but really it's about so much more. Like all memorable sports documentaries — and this Oscar-nominated film is definitely one of those — "Undefeated" is really an examination not of how games are won and lost but how lives are lived, how young people faced with daunting challenges come to see, often in the most dramatic fashion, what is important going forward and what is not. "If you think football builds character, it does not," Bill Courtney, the volunteer coach central to the success of both the film and the Manassas High School team shrewdly observes.

Everett Macy, who joined the Cleveland High staff last fall to resurrect the track program, also has been hired to coach the football team, the school announced Wednesday. Macy, 47, succeeds Steve Landress, who resigned at the end of last season and remains at the school as the junior-varsity baseball coach. Cleveland stumbled to an 0-8-1 record last fall and forfeited its first-round playoff game in the City Section 4-A Division playoffs because of injuries and academic ineligibilities.

First-Team Offense Pos. Name School Ht. Wt. Yr.