Sports

Aptos High dedicated its baseball diamond to brothers Paul and Robert Bailey on Tuesday before the Mariners’ Santa Cruz Coast Athletic League game against Soquel High.

Marcos Reyes rushed for 212 yards and four touchdowns, Hunter Matys ran for a pair of scores and tossed another and the No. 5-seeded Aptos Mariners trounced the top-seeded Palma Chieftains, 49-6, to advance to the Central Coast Section Open Division III championship game.

APTOS—Natalia Ackerman knows what it’s like to hoist a Santa Cruz Coast Athletic League and Central Coast Section Division III basketball title in a single season.  But that was so last season. The 6-foot-1 Aptos High senior forward has her eyes set on something bigger for...

The former head coach and general manager of the four-time Arena Football League-champion San Jose SaberCats, Arbet didn’t promise to break his foot off in his player’s “John Brown hind parts,” as Denzel Washington so eloquently said while playing Boone in the 2000 football flick. But the Seahawks’ heavyweight offseason hire does expect his players to be as close to perfect as possible.

The Mariners, who return nine seniors on a team of 14, still pride themselves on passing — they set a season goal of passing a 2.0 — and they’re not afraid to hit the deck for digs. Hewitt leads a scrappy group of back row players that have set the tone early in the season. Sophomore Cam Dueck and freshman Peyton Dueck have both spent time at libero and will be called upon to continuously keep the team in games while the offense comes along.

The Aptos High football team took an unexpected week off in the middle of the season.   But the Mariners showed little signs of rust in a 49-19 win over Christopher High on Friday in Pacific Coast Athletic League Gabilan division action.    Senior Dre Gomez finished with...

Over the last nine years as the head coach of the Cabrillo College baseball team, Bob Kittle has had numerous student-athletes from all over Santa Cruz County pour into his program. Just last spring, Kittle had at least one player from all but one public school in the county on his roster. Bringing in the best of the best, and watching the talent and personalities from various backgrounds mesh into a powerhouse representation of the county has been one of his favorite aspects of the job. “Santa Cruz County is unique,” Kittle said in a recent phone interview. “There’s a sense of pride in this county… It’s connected.”

Aptos head coach Randy Blankenship said he’ll try to take “a couple of weeks” off to soak in the Mariners’ historic 2018 season, which featured a win in the Central Coast Section Open Division III championship game and Santa Cruz County’s first California Interscholastic Federation NorCal bowl game berth.

• Last year’s record: 7-4 (Central Coast Section Open Division III qualifier) • Last year’s league record: 6-1 (Monterey Bay League Gabilan division runner-up) • Last year’s MaxPreps state ranking: 226th • Coach: Randy Blankenship • Key losses: Blake Wheeler;

The Aptos Mariners — battered and bruised by the end of the night — did their best Rocky Balboa impression, swinging away at the “big piece of meat” over and over again, but there was no fairy tale ending for the group of scrappy underdogs.