Anzar High doesn’t have the talent pool to choose from, but it
has competitive verve
Grab any edition of The Pinnacle and most of the sports stories
are about teams from Gilroy, San Benito, Sobrato or Live Oak High
School.
That can be frustrating for anyone associated with Anzar High
School in San Juan Bautista, especially for the athletes that never
see their names in the paper. And when they do, it’s only a small
fraction of the amount of coverage that the bigger public schools
in the area generate.
Anzar High doesn’t have the talent pool to choose from, but it has competitive verve
Grab any edition of The Pinnacle and most of the sports stories are about teams from Gilroy, San Benito, Sobrato or Live Oak High School.
That can be frustrating for anyone associated with Anzar High School in San Juan Bautista, especially for the athletes that never see their names in the paper. And when they do, it’s only a small fraction of the amount of coverage that the bigger public schools in the area generate.
Perhaps the biggest reason for this is Anzar’s size. With less than 400 students, AHS doesn’t have a football or wrestling program or many junior varsity squads.
For this reason the small school that sits just off U.S. 101 often loses a number of top athletes that opt to transfer to other surrounding schools in order to play the sports that they want.
With a small number of athletes to choose from, teams at Anzar often struggle on the field, which can lead to more transfer requests – especially for the most serious athletes with Division I college potential.
Anzar High students come from both San Juan Bautista and Aromas, both small communities that don’t generate near the talent pool that Hollister, Gilroy or Morgan Hill do.
The Anzar Hawks are also the only local team that competes in the smaller Mission Trails Athletic League in all sports. In contrast, the aforementioned schools all compete in the Tri County Athletic League, which, in turn, naturally fuels a breeding ground for local rivalries and stories of interest to the media.
As a result, Anzar gets the short end of the stick when it comes to publicity.
Recently, we had a chance to talk with Chris Wardlaw, Anzar’s athletic director, who also is the co-head coach on the girls volleyball team, about the challenges of holding the position at the small, unnoticed school poses.
Wardlaw, who teaches math and biology, came to Anzar in 2001. Last year, he did a brief stint at South Pasadena High School before opting to come back to the area. After coming back he took over the position as athletic director from Susie Swing, who held the position after taking it over a year earlier from Wayne Norton. Wardlaw, 31, is married and lives in San Juan Bautista.
What should people know about athletics at Anzar?
We are interested in athletics. I heard a rumor out there that we were trying to phase out athletics. That’s not the case at all. We want to get better and better. We’ve had great success with our cross country program. Some have even qualified to state. Our girls’ volleyball team has made the playoffs five years in a row and won a CCS (Central Coast Section) Division V title in 2003.
Obviously, the Pinnacle is part of the problem on this one. But why do you think your sports teams don’t get more press coverage?
I became the new AD this year and I don’t know what others have done. But I think part of the problem is with Anzar not advertising its athletics very much. The other thing is that are teams don’t do that well. We’re a small school and a public school, which makes it even tougher to compete. So people overlook us.
Do you think you would get more attentnion if you competed in the TCAL?
Yes. All of our opponents are local schools for Monterey. Our biggest rivalry is probably King City, which is an hour and 15 minutes away. I think we’d get more coverage if we were in the TCAL but I don’t think we would do well or be able to compete because are numbers are dwarfed by Gilroy and San Benito and the other schools like that. I think even Sobrato High has much more students than us.
Do you ever compete with the TCAL schools?
Yes. I try to set stuff up all the time. Our volleyball team has competed against and beaten Gilroy. We’ve tried to schedule stuff with Sobrato and Live Oak too. Our basketball team made the playoffs last year for the first time, and most of the players were juniors and sophomores.
Are the atheletes at Anzar frustrated when they see the other teams from surrounding schools winning on the field, when they often have no chance of making the playoffs and often hover at the bottom of the league standing sheets?
For boy athletes, yes. We’ve lost a lot of good athletes because we don’t have a football or a wrestling team. And many of the athletes that play those sports would also play basketball and baseball so it has hurt us a lot.
Do you plan on adding a football team any time soon?
I don’t know if having a football team is a short-term or a long-term goal. This is a small district and we really don’t have the money for a football team. We have been contacted by some small schools in San Jose that are looking to put together a league of eight-man teams. We could do something like that, but I don’t know. We got the call about it a month ago. I’d say wrestling is about two years down the road.
When you do get a top athlete at the school with NCAA Division I talent, how much does the lack of local coverage hamper their ability to get noticed by a large school?
San Benito and Notre Dame-Salinas definitely gets more local press. Most of our kids use the Monterey Bay Preps website to pull up their stats and show them to recruiters and coaches, but it definitely hampers things.
What is your most successful sport right now?
Girls volleyball. We have so many kids try out for volleyball that we have to have cuts. It’s not that way for most other sports here. More kids tryout for volleyball because they know we are good. The student body wants us to be a successful athletic school. At volleyball games we might get 60 to 80 people watching. That’s a lot for a school of this size.
Anything else?
We get a big turnout for golf. There are 25 kids on the golf team right now. I think they come out because it’s a spring sport that can be used for P.E. credit. Also, our home course is San Juan Oaks, and the kids get to play it three times a week, which is a pretty good deal for kids without a lot of money.
What is your biggest sports rivalry?
Gonzales (in the Salinas Valley) is the closest league school but the biggest rivalry seems to be with King City. It might not be as big with the students but it’s big with the team.
What is your biggest challenge?
It’s tough to field JV teams let alone varsity teams. The problem is fielding two teams. Right now we have no baseball or softball JV teams, but we do for the other sports.
Finally, what do you enjoy most about being the athletic director at Anzar?
It has its advantages and disadvantages. It’s good to be able to help out at the school, go to the events and make athletics here better. But the responsibilities and the time that it takes from teaching in the classroom can hurt. I like being here,though.
