Hoops tournament for kids
Forrest Ogletree’s son, Brodie, wasn’t much of a soccer fan a couple of years ago. The tournament that drew him in a little to the sport was the Daily Pilot Cup.
But Brodie really wanted in because his friends from Kaiser Elementary were also going to play and represent their school. It was during that weeklong tournament that Forrest saw what the Daily Pilot Cup does for kids in the community.
“I saw how happy the kids were,” said Forrest, who came up with an idea in the car while leaving a Daily Pilot Cup match with Brodie. “Why don’t we do this for basketball?”
Brodie, who’s more into basketball, thought it was a good idea. His father has followed through by organizing a boys’ basketball tournament.
The two-day Coast Classic enters its second year, and it tips off on Saturday at three different sites, Vanguard University, the Eastbluff Branch of the Boys & Girls Club of the Harbor Area in Newport Beach, and the Downtown Recreation Center in Costa Mesa.
The Coast Classic will feature many of the same schools that participate in the Daily Pilot Cup. The only difference is that the players can use their hands in this tournament.
The tournament will have 205 boys in two different age groups, third- and fourth-graders, and fifth- and sixth-graders, with a gold and silver division for the oldest. The 13 schools involved are Costa Mesa’s Kaiser, Saint Joachim Catholic School, Mariners Christian School and St. John the Baptist Catholic School, Newport Beach’s Mariners Elementary, Newport Heights, Andersen and Carden Hall, Corona del Mar’s Harbor View, Lincoln and Harbor Day School, The Pegasus School in Huntington Beach, and Laguna Beach’s El Morro.
“We expanded to 24 teams this year and we have two divisions, instead of just one for fifth-graders like we had last year,” said Forrest Ogletree, who had eight teams from as many schools in the inaugural tournament. “I think we can expand [the tournament] all throughout Orange County.”
Ogletree knows it will take time to make the tournament as big as the Daily Pilot Cup, which boasted 213 teams in the 16th annual tournament in May. Ogletree said it cost close to $19,000 to put the tournament together, from renting the facilities, to paying the referees, to buying the uniforms. Unlike the Daily Pilot Cup, which gives each player a T-shirt, Ogletree said everyone in the Coast Classic receives a full uniform, shorts and jerseys, with the school’s mascot on the front and number on the back.
Ogletree said the tournament charged each player $50, more than the $10 the Daily Pilot Cup collects per player. He said 10-15 local sponsors and families helped keep the costs down. He added that each team has been practicing for three weeks and each will play at least four games, the maximum is six. The five-on-five tournament will have four eight-minute quarters with a running clock.
This year’s tournament will be different for Ogletree, who’s a personal trainer and lives in Costa Mesa. He won’t be coaching his 11-year-old son’s team from Kaiser, just making sure everything runs as planned. Saturday’s action starts at 8 a.m. and ends at 8 p.m., and on Sunday it goes from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
One team Ogletree expects to be in contention on the final day is Mariners Elementary’s fifth- and sixth-grade A team. Mariners won the tournament last year at UC Irvine’s Crawford Court, and eight of the 10 members off the championship team return.
Robert Hess is coaching the boys again and he’s looking forward to the competition. He’s going to miss the 27th annual Corona del Mar Jack Errion alumni basketball tournament to coach his son, Cody, an incoming sixth-grader at Mariners.
Hess, a 1987 CdM graduate, joked that he’s glad the first day of the Coast Classic and the CdM alumni tournament are on the same day for the second straight year because that way he won’t get hurt by having to play with former Sea Kings.
“I used to run the CdM alumni tournament with my brother, Mike, who started the alumni tournament, and it can be kind of stressful and difficult getting teams to come out, and to see Forrest expand the [Coast Classic] so quickly is remarkable,” Hess said. “No one really knew what to expect the first year [of the Coast Classic] and it was so much fun. It’s very similar to the Pilot Cup. It was just a blast to be able to coach my son and some of the boys he’s grown up with and played with.”
