PACIFICA baseball players salute the flag (GGUSD photo).

The 2024-2025 campaign was a good year for West Orange County basketball teams, with three of them – Santiago and Pacifica boys, along with Bolsa Grande girls – making it into the CIF State Regionals.

It was the Mariners (22-12) who went the furthest, advancing to the second round of the SoCal portion, finally losing 66-46 to Grant High of Van Nuys on Thursday.

That’s as far as any Garden Grove Unified School District team has gone since 1994 when the Mariners came within one game of playing for the state title.

This year’s version did pretty well. too, and the current coach, David Friedman, notched his 400th career coaching victory this year.

Going up to bat …
Attention now shifts to the premier spring sports, baseball and softball. As has been the custom in recent years, the marquee teams again are the Huntington Beach Oilers’ baseball team and the Pacifica softball squad.

Taking a look today at softball (we’ll focus next column on baseball), Pacifica is, indeed, at the top for our area as well as much of Orange County and beyond. The M’s are off to a 5-1 start.

Among their outstanding players so far are senior Kloe Lobato, who is batting .429, junior Leyla Ayres with two home runs and four stolen bases and junior Ariana Salas with an 0.88 ERA.

The main challenger for Tony Anduino’s team for the Crestview League pennant looks to be the Cypress Centurions (8-1). They’ll meet on April 1 and April 17. Ought to be a pair of good games.

Other area teams fast out of the gate are Huntington Beach (3-0) and Los Amigos (5-0).

With winning records are Marina and Santiago (both 2-1).

For the Vikings, Gabriella DiBenedetto is batting .500 and Ava Kim has a 2.11 ERA.

At Garden Grove High (3-3), Jazmine Santos is hitting .471 and Hailee Le has stolen 12 bases, which has got to make her the Orange County leader, right?