Lara

“Welcome home.”

A Long Beach Poly assistant football coach offered a warm greeting to Mater Dei football coach Raul Lara on Saturday morning before the start of a summer passing tournament at Poly.

Lara, a Poly graduate who won five Southern Section championships in 13 seasons as the Jackrabbits’ head coach, was struck by some of the changes he saw, such as an all-weather sports field and bungalows on the old baseball field. The school has begun a $450-million construction project.

“I haven’t been here in a while,” Lara said. “They’re doing a lot of reconstruction. It’s pretty neat. It will be interesting when it’s completed. We didn’t have this. We had a dirt track, regular grass field. We used to have a pole by those two trash cans and we had a coach, Don Norford, that every time he yelled, ‘Hit the pole,’ everybody knew they were in trouble.”

Lara won a Southern Section Division 1 title and state championship last season in his first year at Mater Dei, and his team is a heavy favorite to repeat thanks to strong offensive and defensive lines as well as a receiving group that includes receiver Chris Henry Jr., who has commited to Ohio State, and tight end Mark Bowman, who has committed to USC.

“That group is special,” he said of his receiver group that includes Ohio State commit Kayden Dixon-Wyatt, Georgia commit Gavin Honore and senior Koen Parnell.

Still to be decided is who starts at quarterback, with Wisconsin commit Ryan Hopkins competing with Minnesota commit Furian Inferrera. Asked if he could end up playing both, Lara said it was possible.

Asked if he was still having fun, Lara said, “It’s a different kind of fun. It’s more of a CEO fun. I have an awesome staff. All I do is make sure it’s functioning. They do a fantastic job.”

Saturday’s competition featured a rarity in that three outstanding tight ends were in the spotlight — Bowman, a USC commit; Andre Nickerson of Inglewood, an Southern Methodist commit; Jaden Hernandez of Poly, a Colorado State commit. Defensive backs were pushing and shoving and the tight ends were having none of that.

Long Beach Poly tight end Jaden Hernandez makes a catch.

(Craig Weston)

Mayfair has two college-bound defensive backs in Chaz Gilbreath (UC Davis) and Miles Mitchell (Air Force). Mitchell has a 4.5 grade-point average.

Poly’s Donte Wright is a junior cornerback committed to Georgia with a big upside because he’s 6 feet 2 and still growing with track speed. The Jackrabbits made it to the final of their tournament before losing to Mater Dei.

Teams are winding down their summer seven-on-seven passing tournament schedules. Coaches are starting to pass out shoulder pads because official practice begins July 28.

West Indies have been battling with “systemic issues” for 25 years that have left them with players “ill-equipped” to deal with the challenges they faced against Australia, according to Trinidadian commentator Fazeer Mohammed.

“It was almost the perfect storm,” he told BBC Sport.

“You’ve got Mitchell Starc, a world class bowler, deadly in any sort of situation and even deadlier with the pink ball, coming up against players really ill-equipped to deal with those sorts of challenges.

“Everything was set up for something like this to happen. You never really factor in 27 all out but, in the general context of West Indies cricket, this was an accident waiting to happen.”

While Lara has been drafted in to help find a solution to the problems facing the current side, Mohammed believes the iconic left-hander’s heroics were part of the reason a lot of the issues were masked for so long.

“What lies behind it is the failure to address the fundamental challenges in our domestic game – in our regional game,” he added.

“We have many different challenges. Fundamental to those would be costs because we have many different territories – it’s very costly to travel around the Caribbean, to host tournaments.

“There’s an air of resignation about it. People will this morning be arguing amongst themselves and debating about how this can happen, who needs to be fired, who needs to be dropped, who needs to be got rid of.

“It’s the same sort of knee-jerk reaction and then they’ll shrug their shoulders and say ‘well this is how it is now’.”

It is almost two and a half years since West Indies last won a Test series – 1-0 in Zimbabwe – and three years since their last home series victory, 2-0 against Bangladesh.

“I don’t think all is lost by any stretch of the imagination,” Mohammed said.

“It requires at a very fundamental level at the schools, at the under-19, under-23 levels a serious financial investment in growing the quality of the game – male and female.

“But also there has to be, first and foremost, that recognition that Test cricket still means something to us in the Caribbean.”