Poly High School

Lakewood has a new mayor. Larry Van Nostran was elevated from vice mayor to mayor by his City Council colleagues at their annual reorganization meeting Tuesday night. He succeeds Jacqueline Rynerson as mayor. Van Nostran, who was first elected in 1975, is the senior member of the council. This will be his fourth stint in the mayor's chair. He owns Larry Van's used car business in Long Beach. The new vice mayor is Councilman Wayne Piercy, who served a term as mayor in 1974.

Raul Lara, your Long Beach Poly Jackrabbits just won the Southern Section Pac-5 Division title. What are you going to do now? He's going to Central Juvenile Hall, actually. That's where the coach of the most storied high school football program in Southern California headed late Saturday night, arriving about two hours after the Jackrabbits polished off a come-from-behind 20-17 victory over Rancho Santa Margarita Tesoro. He was just doing his job -- both of them.

Lisa Drollinger entered high school with a choice many sophomores in Long Beach public schools face: Which sorority should she join? It was an easy decision for Drollinger, now a 17-year-old who will graduate from Poly High School this spring. She wanted to become a member of Poly's in-crowd. "Since ninth grade, everyone knew I wanted to pledge Scarabs," she said of one of the more popular clubs.

Perennial high school football powerhouses Long Beach Poly and Concord De La Salle are making an impact on the sport that reaches well beyond the prep level, according to figures released Thursday by USA Football, the sport's national governing body. Each school boasted six former players -- the most among high schools nationwide -- who were on 2007 opening-weekend rosters in the NFL.

Rep. Mervyn M. Dymally (D-Compton) has appointed his aide, James S. Fukumoto, staff director of the House Subcommittee on Postal Personnel and Modernization. Fukumoto, who grew up in Long Beach and was graduated from Poly High School there, is on leave from his position as a senior executive with the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

A group of musicians is shooting the breeze at V.I.P. Records, a hangout for rappers across the street from Long Beach Polytechnic High School, when Poly's cross-country team runs by. "You never would have seen that 20 years ago," says Kirk Jones, a former National Football League player who graduated from Poly in 1984. The group at the record store is African American. Nearly all of the two dozen runners on the cross-country team are white. Jones points to the team with pride.

Two dozen cheerleaders whipped up excitement in the packed gym but Poly High School still struggled toward a half-time tie with Compton, and the glorious past seemed much further removed than a year. The stars were gone, as was the school's latest version of John Wooden, and fans who had stomached six losses in 14 games were wondering if tradition was on the verge of leaving too. Chris Sandle . . . Terry Stallworth . . .

Perennial high school football powerhouses Long Beach Poly and Concord De La Salle are making an impact on the sport that reaches well beyond the prep level, according to figures released Thursday by USA Football, the sport's national governing body. Each school boasted six former players -- the most among high schools nationwide -- who were on 2007 opening-weekend rosters in the NFL.

Almost 40 years ago, left-handed shooting guard named Gail Goodrich led Poly High to its first and only City Section boys' basketball championship. Goodrich went on to become an All-American at UCLA, an all-star with the Lakers and a member of basketball's Hall of Fame. No one is about to compare sophomore guard Mike Mgdesyan with Goodrich, but with a 4.0 grade-point average and what his coach says is the "heart of a lion," Mgdesyan is a worthy successor in the Goodrich tradition.

Raul Lara, your Long Beach Poly Jackrabbits just won the Southern Section Pac-5 Division title. What are you going to do now? He's going to Central Juvenile Hall, actually. That's where the coach of the most storied high school football program in Southern California headed late Saturday night, arriving about two hours after the Jackrabbits polished off a come-from-behind 20-17 victory over Rancho Santa Margarita Tesoro. He was just doing his job -- both of them.

John Francis Polytechnic High School had an unusual reason to celebrate Monday: Most of its freshmen passed their classes. For the first time in recent memory, the Sun Valley school will enroll more 10th-graders than ninth-graders in the upcoming year because so many students earned enough credits to advance. Poly High's ninth-graders and their teachers closed their successful year with a pancake breakfast and a dance contest featuring hip-hop tunes.

Carl Buggs, girls' basketball coach at Long Beach Poly, knew April Phillips from state regional games played against Harbor City Narbonne. Background player. Good. Nothing like Lisa Willis or Indi Johnson, who starred at Narbonne during Phillips' freshman and sophomore seasons in the South Bay. Frustrated, Phillips says, by "a mutual respect issue" with the Narbonne program, she transferred to Poly about a week into the 2003-04 season.

There may be no high school football coach in Southern California who's a bigger target for fan abuse than Raul Lara of Long Beach Poly. Poly fans expect their team to win every game and every championship, and when it doesn't happen, they want their coach fired. In the Internet chat rooms for high school football, Lara's critics unleash the kind of venom usually reserved for a college or NFL coach. Lara, 37, understood the challenge when he became coach in 2001. "Of course, I knew," he said.

Gail Goodrich might be the greatest basketball player ever born and raised in Los Angeles. He helped UCLA win its first two NCAA championships, in 1964 and 1965. He led the Lakers in scoring during their championship season in 1971-72 when they won 33 consecutive games. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1996.

Long Beach Poly High has hired Raul Lara to coach its defending Southern Section Division I champion football team. Lara, 35, has been Poly's defensive coordinator since 1995. He replaces Jerry Jaso, who resigned to become an assistant coach at Long Beach City College. Sean Simpson was hired as football coach at Huntington Beach Ocean View High.

The photo was taken during a moment of sorrow and distress. Abraham Gonzalez and Joe Hampel, sophomore pitchers for Poly High, were sitting on the mound at Dodger Stadium dealing with defeat. Off to the side, Chatsworth players were untangling themselves from a dog pile celebrating a 17-7 victory in the 1999 City Championship baseball game. Hampel put his arm around Gonzalez and tried to comfort him. "We'll be playing here again," Hampel said.

Poly High was removed from the City Section boys' soccer playoffs Tuesday after using an ineligible player in a 1-0 quarterfinal victory over Birmingham on Friday. The third-seeded Parrots, the highest remaining seeded team in the section playoffs, were scheduled to host 10th-seeded Bell in a semifinal Tuesday. Instead, 11th-seeded Birmingham will play at Bell at 3 p.m. today.

Jerry Cord is remembered by colleagues as always giving a good fight during his 18 seasons as the Poly High baseball coach. Although he hasn't coached in four years, Cord is still fighting--this time for his life. For the past year, Cord, 56, has battled Hodgkin's disease, a form of cancer that affects the lymph nodes. He met with a radiation therapist for the first time Wednesday before going to Dodger Stadium to watch Poly in the City Section 4-A Division championship game against Kennedy.

Accusations and recriminations from Friday's emotional baseball game between Poly and San Fernando continued Monday, with San Fernando Coach Armando Gomez contending that Poly's Zack Sims-Jones should be suspended for the season for running into first baseman Jesus Martinez. Martinez has a broken collarbone and is out six to eight weeks after the first-inning collision, in which Sims-Jones was running out a pop-up. Umpires ejected Sims-Jones after the play.

Juan Guerrero's teammates and coaches at Poly High rarely call the senior slugger by his birth name. Instead, they settled on two nicknames, neither of which do justice to his reputation as one of the region's most feared hitters. Guerrero was called "O-fer" early in his sophomore season because it was fun to pick on the new guy. But when that name no longer applied, Guerrero's teammates went back to calling him "Chivo," a childhood nickname he inherited from his father.