cal83dls79 said:
SF City: I wonder when the whole tryout thing died? Seemed like a heck of a process/guantlet to get the best walk-on imaginable. I'm curious, were the tryouts for kids who had actually been admitted to Cal already or were hopeful of being admitted (and where perhaps the coach could put in a word to the admin?). Also, you were right about the intramurals, even in the 80s those leagues had good players where being in the C league was more than I could handle and focused my limited basketball skills on rebounding, passing and defense. Great share btw.
Thanks. I didn't intend to write that much, but was reacting to a post which I took offense to, and I got carried away..
In the Fall of 1959, after I arrived on campus, tryouts for the Frosh basketball team were just quietly announced somewhere. It could have been in the Daily Cal, or it could have been just a notice on the bulletin board at Harmon Gym. As I remember it was a simple notice, one sentence, such as: "Open tryouts will be held for the Cal Frosh Basketball team in the Harmon Gym for three consecutive days, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, from 2PM to 5 PM each day." At the first scrimmage, players of all sizes showed up, and we were told the tryouts would consist of three days of full court scrimmages, with teams to be made up by the coaches, and at the end of the 3 days, a team of 18 players will be chosen to make up the 1959 Frosh team. It was very similar to the team tryouts I had in all 4 years of high school basketball, except that at Lowell, it was one day of scrimmaging, not three consecutive days, which was grueling.
Coach Herrerias never told us directly, but we soon found out, first by rumor, word of mouth, then later confirmed by one of the assistant coaches, that some of the players already had scholarships, 17 of them to be exact. So we were competing with or against scholarship players. I don't know if one of us had played better than a scholarship player, then the scholarship player might have been cut. I do think if we had know that those of us who had no scholarship were all just trying out for only one walk-on spot, then against those odds, there would likely have been far fewer of us trying out for the team.
There was also a varsity tryout and in the Fall of 1960, I was invited to try out for that team. I had spent the summer weight-lifting and bulking up at the direction of the coaches, but I had played little basketball. With my new body and new muscles, I shot so poorly in the first day of scrimmaging, that I got pretty embarrassed and bailed out. I don't know when Cal discontinued tryouts for their basketball teams. Maybe the interest wasn't there among the studentbody.
As to intramurals, I had lunch with a high school teammate not long ago, a Japanese-American and he said his son's intramural team had won the Cal intramural championship after a few years of trying. His son told him, "Dad, we finally figured out how to win the championship. We went out and got the tallest players we could find."
SFCityBear