It’s impossible to sum up the sporting contributions to Ventura County history in a single volume, never mind a single story.
But the collective work under the bylines of Chuck Thomas, Jim Parker, Derry Eads, Loren Ledin, Rhiannon Potkey and their predecessors, colleagues and successors in these pages over the past century would get the job done.
Since its inception, The Star’s sports department has covered the biggest moments and most minute details on and off the field over the past ten decades.
As The Star marks its 100th anniversary, here are a few of the highlights:
Taking the field
High school sports had existed locally for years when The Star began publishing in 1925.
The Ventura County Athletic Association, consisting of representatives from Fillmore, Nordhoff, Oxnard, Santa Paula, Thacher and Ventura highs, had organized sports — including, baseball, boys and girls basketball, tennis and track — for more than a decade.
But The Star’s arrival coincided with the rise of high school football. Fillmore, Oxnard and Ventura contested the first local football season in 1923, with Moorpark and Santa Paula joining the next season and Simi Valley adding in 1925.
More than 100 years and 114 games later, Fillmore and Santa Paula have built one of the most historic high school football rivalries in the entire country.
Oxnard delivered the county’s first CIF championship in 1928, when the Ventura County champions were matched with Santa Barbara, the champion of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.
Oxnard won 13-12 on “a long pass to McKenzie,” according to The Star’s Dec. 10 edition.
“Oxnarders are Champions of Northern Grid Division,” blared the headline.
Ventura followed in 1951, sharing the title with host Paso Robles after a 14-14 tie.
Ernie Beyer’s “Preps Tie for CIF Championship” describes a title-sharing 81-yard fourth-quarter march. “Goodman” caught a fourth-quarter touchdown pass from “McCauley” and Brokaw followed with the game-tying conversion.
There was controversy when spectators were informed that Paso Robles had won the game on the tiebreaker of the era — most first downs — but that was corrected.
Beyer described Paso Robles final first down, its 11th to Ventura’s 10th:
“It was very unspectacular — hardly the sort of thing that a CIF championship should be based upon. And, as it turned out, it wasn’t.”
The competition expanded as the county and region grew after World War II.
Camarillo and Hueneme were built in the 1950s. Agoura, Buena, Channel Islands, Newbury Park, Rio Mesa, Royal and Thousand Oaks came online in the 1960s. Calabasas, Oak Park and Westlake joined in the 1970s. Oaks Christian, Pacifica and Del Sol, the most recent addition, joined the fun this century.
Olympic glory
Bud Houser was the reigning Olympic shot put and discus champion when The Star arrived.
At the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, the Oxnard High graduate defended his gold medal in the discus, breaking his own Olympic record with a toss of 155 feet, 3 inches.
The August 1, 1928, edition of The Star proclaimed him “One of Few United States Stars to be Victor.”
Oxnard rower Peter Donlon also won Olympic gold in Amsterdam, as the stroke of the UC Berkeley eights. He helped coach the Cal team that won the eights in Los Angeles four years later.
Labeled as the “senior citizen” of the U.S. track and field team at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, 30-year-old Fillmore school teacher Mike Larrabee won the 400 meters in 45.10 seconds.
The October 19, 1964, edition of The Star was emblazoned with the headline “Larrabee Good As Gold In Olympics”
The Ventura High grad, who tied the world record at the U.S. Olympic Trials earlier in the year, is still the oldest Olympic champion in the event. He was also part of the gold medal-winning team in the 4×400 meters in Tokyo.
The stadiums at Oxnard High and Ventura High have been renamed in honor of Houser and Larrabee, respectively.
Other local gold medalists include Simi Valley’s Angela Ruggiero (ice hockey, 1998); Camarillo’s Jessica Mendoza (softball, 2004); Thousand Oaks’ Will Simpson (equestrian, 2008); Ventura’s Phil Dalhausser (beach volleyball, 2008); Camarillo’s Bob and Mike Bryan (tennis, 2012); Moorpark’s Amanda Longan (water polo, 2020); and Agoura Hill’s Tara Davis-Woodhall (long jump, 2024).
Of course, track and field superstar Marion Jones won three gold medals and two bronze medals at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. But the Thousand Oaks High graduate was later stripped of the medals after admitting to taking performance-enhancing drugs as part of the infamous BALCO investigation.
The Olympics actually came to Ventura County in 1984, when the rowing and canoeing events of the Los Angeles games were held at Lake Casitas.
The Olympic flame was run through Ventura and Oxnard a month before the athletes’ competed, when Highway 33 was bumper to bumper with traffic. But a reader summed up the Olympic experience:
“The trials, tribulations and cost of the Olympics being held in Ventura County will be a short memory, but the honor will be savored for years to come,” wrote Dwight Cates of Ventura.
Sporting meccas
The Conejo Valley has developed into a distance running mecca.
Thousand Oaks’ Kim Mortensen (1996), Simi Valley’s Sarah Baxter (2013), Newbury Park’s Nico Young (2020) and Newbury Park’s Colin Sahlman (2022) have won Gatorade National Boys or Girls Runner of the Year honors.
In 2024, Ventura’s Sadie Engelhardt became the sixth local to win the Gatorade National Girls Track Athlete of the Year honors, joining Mortensen, Jones (1991-93) and Rio Mesa’s Angela Burham (1988).
La Colonia Boxing Gym launched the careers of Fernando Vargas and Robert Garcia and made Oxnard synonymous with the sport of boxing.
“The gym took this kid with anger issues and no father to success of becoming a world champion,” Vargas told The Star in 2019. “If it wasn’t for the gym, I would be locked up in jail or dead.”
Garcia has the gym tattooed on his arm.
“The gym is historic building,” Garcia said. “I started there when I was 5 years old. We always represented the club on our trunks wherever we fought. The gym is where we grew up. Thousands of kids learn the sport, learned discipline.”
Ojai is an internationally known tennis capital, due to The Ojai, the tennis tournament which dates back to 1896.
Some of the biggest names in tennis are enshrined in the tournament’s Wall of Fame, including Billy Jean King, Jimmy Connors, Arthur Ashe, and Pete Sampras.
“There is nothing comparable to playing The Ojai as a young junior growing up in Southern California,” Bob Bryan told The Star in 2024.
At the bat
Baseball had a half-century of history in the county before The Star was around to chronicle it.
Babe Ruth twice came to Santa Barbara to play against Fred Snodgrass and his Ventura All-Stars.
Snodgrass, one of Ventura’s first major leaguers, was a member of the inaugural class of the Ventura County Sports Hall of Fame in 1983.
Babe Ruth Field was constructed at Seaside Park, where the fairgrounds parking lot sits today, and served as home to several minor league teams, including the Ventura Yankees (1947-49), the Ventura Braves (1950-52), and the Channel Cities Oilers (1953-55).
The Ventura County Gulls, of the Class-A Advanced California League, played a season at Ventura College in 1986 with a roster full of several future Toronto Blue Jays, including World Series champions David Wells and Todd Stottlemyre.
Santa Paula’s Jim Colborn served as the team’s pitching coach.
“We hope we can shine some baseball sun on Ventura County and the Ventura community,” Colburn told The Star in January 1986.
Star-Free Press reporter Eddie Ibardolasa spent a week with the Gulls at the Blue Jays’ spring training home in Dunedin, Florida.
The Pacific Suns of the independent Western League played a season at Oxnard College in 1998.
On the map
Many outside the state know Ventura County as the summer home of the Dallas Cowboys.
They held their annual training camp at Cal Lutheran University before 27 seasons, from 1963 to 1989.
Both the Cowboys and CLU — then Cal Lutheran College — were only a few years old when team president Tex Schramm struck a deal with college president Orville Dahl in 1963.
“The relationship just seemed to grow out of a spirit of trust,” CLU football coach Bob Shoup told The Star in 2001. “We could be honest with one another. My relationship with Schramm and Tom Landry was marvelous. Landry became a fond admirer of Cal Lutheran University and the Conejo Valley.”
The relationship with the county continues at River Ridge Fields. Owner Jerry Jones will bring “America’s Team” back next month for its 19th camp in Oxnard.
CLU had a second act with the National Football League when the Rams returned to Los Angeles and set up their temporary football headquarters on CLU’s North Campus from 2016 until 2024.
The facility is now home to Angel City FC of the National Women’s Soccer League.
“This new dedicated performance center … lives up to our ambitions, setting a new bar for what professional athletes need to become champions on the pitch and support their needs off the pitch,” Angel City president Julie Uhrman said last year.
Lately, soccer has also been a professional summer pastime locally.
The Ventura County Fusion won the United Soccer League’s Premier Development League title in 2009, beating the Chicago Fire Under-23s 2-1 at Buena High.
The Los Angeles Galaxy also moved its reserve team to CLU last summer, creating Ventura County FC and bringing MLS Next soccer to Thousand Oaks.
Joe Curley has been a staff writer for The Star from 2000. He can be reached at joe.curley@vcstar.com. For more coverage, follow @vcsjoecurley on Twitter/X, Instagram/Threads, Facebook and Bluesky.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Sports has taken center stage in Ventura County during The Star’s 100 years of coverage
Reporting by Joe Curley, Ventura County Star / Ventura County Star
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