SoCalHoops Tournament News

Artesia Varsity "Summer Shootout"
Tourney Cancelled--(June 13, 2000)

We received an e-mail yesterday informing us of the cancellation of the Artesia Summer Shootout, a boys' varsity tournament which had scheduled to take place from June 28 to July 1st at Artesia HS.  The Summer Shootout had been planned as a sort of scaled-down version of the much bigger summer version of the "Best in the West Tournament," which was actually two tournaments over a two week period.   Even though many area teams,  including Crossroads, Clovis West, San Bernardino, Long Beach Poly, Pacific Hills, Perris, North Torrance, Millikan and Ontario had been announced as  committed to play in the Shootout,  with all of the turmoil at the school, including the termination of head coach Wayne Merino, the school reached a decision this week to cancel the tournament.

Here's the relevant portion of the message we received yesterday:

"The Artesia Summer Shoot-out will not take place. A late start up on this tournament is causing problems. Even with this late start,  the tournament could still go on,  but a number of quality teams that the tournament had come to expect could not be there this summer due to the late organization of the event."

We confirmed the cancellation this morning, and spoke with Stan Brown, the Athletic Director at Artesia, said, "With everything that's happened, we decided it would be better to take a year off, let things get back to normal and then think about hosting a varsity tournament.  A number of teams who we thought might be there couldn't be and we didn't want to have teams show up and not have games," Brown said.  "Also we didn't think it was fair to the coaches who are working with our varsity players this summer to put them through the additional strain of running a tournament." 

"We're still going to be hosting two JV boys' tournaments, one from the 6th -9th of July and the other from the 20th-23rd, a freshman tournament from the 17th-19th of July, and a really big Girl's Varsity tournament from July 12th-15th," Brown noted.  "Those tournaments are full right now, but we just don't have the resources to do a varsity tournament.  Maybe next year, whoever the head man will be, will decide to do it.  But that will be up to whoever we hire," Brown said.

"By the way," Brown added, "we are in the process of looking for a new head coach for the boys' varsity, and interested applicants can contact me directly."

Stan Brown can be reached at 562-926-5566, ext. 4356. 

 
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