Rio Hondo Prep in Arcadia is like “The Little Engine That Could.” The Kares are 13-0 and set to play for a 17th Southern Section football title on Saturday night despite having a student body of only 150, of which 82 are boys. Their opponent in the Division 5 final is host Redondo Union, which has a student body of nearly 3,000.
Coach Mark Carson said he embraces the challenge of his team moving up, from winning Division 9 two years ago to winning Division 7 last season after years of competing in Division XIII under old playoff systems based on size, geography and past performance. Now a computer algorithm decides divisional placement. The school has grades seven through 12, so Carson starts training players in middle school with the same offense through high school.
“The key is we have a great middle school tackle football program,” he said.
Every boy in the school knows they’re going to play football or work in the program as a manager. Many are multiple-sport athletes. The chemistry and knowledge they build together is apparent on the football field.
“We don’t really pay attention to numbers on the other team,” Carson said.
Quarterback Yanick Diaz said he has been with some of his teammates since kindergarten. They trust each other.
“I’ve known some of these guys for 15, 16 years,” Diaz said. “It’s still 11 versus 11. I’ll take my 11 over yours.”
This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].
“Thoughts & Prayers,” premiering Tuesday on HBO, is a documentary film about the $3-billion “active shooter preparedness industry,” that space where American failure meets American entrepreneurism. Though it approaches its subject with a certain formal neutrality, the title, a phrase now synonymous with political emptiness, does suggest a point of view. (Its subtitle is “How to Survive an Active Shooter in America.”)
That industry includes various forms of training involving teachers, students and first responders and products theoretically created to increase security — locks, alarms, robot dogs, bulletproof backpacks, bulletproof glass and bulletproof shelters that sit in the corner of a classroom. One company will put an image of your choice on a bulletproof wall hanging and sells a “skateboard [that] will outperform any other skateboard on the market, but it’s also a self defense shield.” “Every time there’s a tragedy, it economically benefits my family,” its founder admits. “We could be a $300-million company by the time this documentary airs.”
One company makes tourniquets “easy to apply in case of a mass casualty incident”; another specializes in latex bullet wounds for use in mass shooter drills: “the gunshot through and through to the neck … the multiple gunshot wound to the abdomen.” One senses in these endeavors a not insincere overreaction that substitutes for political action, shifting responsibility onto potential victims and accepting the problem as intractable. (Or as the Onion headline, published 38 times since 2014, has it, “No Way to Prevent This, Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”)
Directed by Zackary Canepari and Jessica Dimmock, it’s a sad black comedy, an Errol Morris sort of subject, shot in an Errol Morris sort of way — formal, neutral. The cinematography, by Jarred Alterman, is quite handsome and composed, amplifying the seriousness and eeriness, but also the banality and absurdity of the matter. Subjects face the camera head on, sometimes to speak, sometimes to sit silently for a portrait that might find them covered in fake blood and wounds from a role-playing exercise. The film gets a lot of mileage just settling on faces, tracking reactions, or lack of reaction. The camera is static, steady; action moves in and through the frame, sometimes in slow motion, like movie violence. This observational approach is regularly undercut, unfortunately, by a heavy-handed soundtrack that makes the film feel less trustworthy. It’s an aesthetic and rhetorical failure, but not a fatal one.
The documentary states that 95% of American school children practice lockdown drills.
(HBO)
More than 20 million adults have had active shooter training, learning how to keep doors shut or disarm a shooter, participating in multiplayer video simulations. In Provo, Utah, teachers learn to shoot. (“Breathe in through our nose, out through your mouth — let all that tension come out of you.”) But “Thoughts & Prayers” is most powerful when looking at or listening to the kids: 95% of American schools, we’re told, practice lockdown drills, which can begin as early as Pre-K (with “dinosaurs” substituted for gunmen, to, I don’t know, reduce trauma).
The film’s last act follows a massive reenactment at a Medford, Ore., high school, where a “mass casualty drill” was scheduled after a janitor turned himself into police before acting on homicidal thoughts. (They discovered many weapons in his home, and a written plan of attack.) Kids, made up as victims, litter the halls and gym field. Masked “shooters” go room to room. The police chief gives, as a sign on the podium reads, a “fake press conference.”
“This is the reality, this is where we are in this country, where we are in this valley,” says the school superintendent afterward. “But I do not want to lose the fact that it is still a sad thing that we have to do this. Still, you may wonder what good it will actually do, and hope not to find out.”
What passes for a gun debate is relegated to some warring soundbites from the floor of Congress, and the opinion of one trainer (named Thrasher) that guns aren’t the problem, but “family structures” and “the lack of tribalism.” But here’s Quinn, a high school freshman from Long Island, N.Y., as close as anyone here gets to addressing the issue. It’s worth giving her the last word.
“I don’t think that a lot of adults care about our opinions. We go through this every single day. We go through, like, being afraid of going to school because we might get shot, or we might lose a friend, or we might lose a teacher. And a lot of people care about their … rights, I guess, more about, ‘Oh well, I want to have the ability to own a gun, and so I don’t care if you get shot in your class.’ It’s just kind of disheartening. ‘Cause it’s like, oh, you care more about yourself than all of the students in America.”
Whether he knows it or not, 6-foot-5 Zane Daoud of San Marino High is going to be a role model for kids born deaf.
He was one of them, 60% deaf since birth. He rebelled against wearing hearing aids. He’d take them off constantly while growing up. By high school, he says he figured out how much they could help him and stopped worrying what people thought. He should be a top basketball player for Rio Hondo League favorite San Marino this season.
“I’ve accepted I have hearing loss,” he said. “When I was younger, I didn’t really want to come to terms with it. I didn’t want to wear my hearing aids all the time. I didn’t want to use my accommodations. I denied I had it and acted like I could go through my life without my hearing aids. As I got older, I realized I can’t hear without them..”
He’s a straight-A student and discovered his parents were right.
“My parents were always telling me, ‘You need to wear them,’” he said. “I said I didn’t need to wear them.”
In high school, he learned he could hear better talking to people and listening to his coach. Maturity and experiences have taught him how to succeed.
This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].
She doesn’t have a driver’s license. Often doesn’t get movie references. Reminds many of their little sisters.
There’s always some story or tidbit involving Meila Brewer that will make her teammates laugh or gush about playing alongside the freshman center back who’s believed to be the youngest athlete in UCLA history.
Why, it wasn’t so long ago that Brewer floored everybody else on the women’s soccer team when each player shared how old they were when the pandemic hit. As almost everybody ticked off one year or another in high school, all eyes turned to Brewer.
“Oh,” she announced, “I was in fifth grade.”
Meila Brewer extends her arms, smiles and runs to embrace her UCLA teammates during a match against Stanford.
(UCLA Athletics)
That doesn’t mean that she’s easily identifiable. Coach Margueritte Aozasa has made an informal game of asking anyone who inquires about having a 16-year-old on her roster to pick her out when scanning the players on the field.
No one has gotten it right on the first handful of attempts.
“They’ll point out three or four players,” Aozasa said, “and I’ll be like, ‘No, it’s probably the one you would least expect.’ ”
Being one of the tallest players on the team at 5-foot-8 provides some cover, but it’s also her precocious nature and the skills she developed while training with a professional team and playing for the U.S. youth national team that give her a veteran presence.
There’s been no underage shrinking, Brewer living up to every moment as fourth-seeded UCLA (11-5-3) prepares to open the NCAA tournament at 6 p.m. Saturday at home against Pepperdine (11-6-2).
Meila Brewer dribbles the ball while playing for UCLA during the 2025 season. Brewer, 16, is the youngest athlete to ever compete in a sport at UCLA.
(UCLA Athletics)
OK, maybe a hint of her youth emerged when she was asked how she felt about playing on college soccer’s biggest stage.
“Freaking out,” Brewer said. “Like, when you think about it, I’m soooo excited, that’s like the only way you can put it.”
This will be just her eighth game with the Bruins as a result of her recent participation in the FIFA under-17 Women’s World Cup in Morocco, where the Americans won their group before losing to the Netherlands on penalty kicks in the Round of 16.
Her UCLA teammates followed the action from afar, one posting a picture of herself shedding celebratory tears in a group chat after Brewer scored in the opening game. After the competition ended, Brewer boarded one flight for Atlanta before getting on another one bound for Los Angeles, only to hop back on a third plane a little more than 12 hours later to accompany her Bruins teammates to West Lafayette, Ind., for the Big Ten tournament.
“Coming back from Morocco, I had missed a decent amount of games,” Brewer said, “but I feel like the girls have been so supportive of helping me get reintegrated and getting right back into the flow just because we’re in tournament time and we want to succeed.”
Aozasa said she’s reminded her players that there’s a 16-year-old on the team and to behave appropriately. Brewer’s roommate, Payten Cooper, is two years older than her even though she’s also a freshman. Lexi Wright, a redshirt senior forward, is seven years older.
But those age gaps aren’t a big deal to Brewer considering she’s already spent a year and a half training with players in their 30s on the Kansas City Current, a team in the National Women’s Soccer League.
“It’s no surprise that she’s gonna be able to fit in right away and be successful at that level at UCLA,” said Vasil Ristov, the coach of the Current’s second team who was also Brewer’s youth club coach, “because she’s seen some of the top talent in the world and she’s participated in training sessions with them.”
Just reaching UCLA at such a young age was a major triumph.
Having taken a heavy class load in middle school and her first two years of high school to lessen the academic burden on her later, Brewer had reclassified once by the time she visited UCLA last spring. That’s when her love for a place she had long considered her dream school truly took hold, Brewer feeling the pull to play immediately even though she had more than a year of high school remaining.
“She was like, ‘What if I just come in this fall?’ ” said her father, Austin Brewer, who was also on the trip. “And I’m like, ‘Well, I don’t think it works that way.’ ”
After checking it out, the family realized it was a possibility. Meila (pronounced MEE-luh) worked nonstop from April through the end of July. She didn’t get to participate in high school graduation ceremonies but was rewarded with something greater — a chance to play for the Bruins.
UCLA freshman Meila Brewer controls the ball while playing Tennessee during the 2025 season.
(UCLA Athletics)
Her schedule includes nearly as many parent check-ins as classes. Austin and Shelly Brewer routinely call in the morning, midday and evening, sometimes adding oldest daughter Sasha, a freshman defender for the University of Miami women’s soccer team, to FaceTime chats.
Classes haven’t been as hard as Brewer imagined, though she’s still trying to pick a major.
“Coming into college,” she said, “I was prepping myself for the worst, so I feel like I was ready for it.”
On the field, Brewer is known for a physical style that allows her to impede opposing forwards in her role as a defender and smart playmaking while on the attack. They’re all traits that could help her fulfill her goal of playing for the U.S. national team.
Having always played up one or more levels on club teams, sometimes alongside boys, Brewer developed a strong sense of self.
“I asked her once who her favorite player was, who did she want to be like,” Shelly Brewer said, “and I’ll never forget this — we laugh about it all the time — she said, ‘I don’t want to be like anyone; I want to be like me.’ ”
In a nod to her age and the fact that she’s still growing, Brewer sometimes gets tendinitis in her knees. She wants to be just one of the girls, her youth a novelty but not a defining characteristic.
“I want to be seen as an equal on the field or a leader on the field in what I can do besides my age,” she said. “I just want to be able to stand out for how I play and not on the age side of it.”
That’s not to say that someone who won’t turn 17 until March isn’t having as much fun as everybody else whenever the subject comes up.
“It’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re a baby,’ ” Brewer said, “and I’m like, ‘Yep, I am.’ ”
