Huntington Beach Sports Hall of Fame inducts first class
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The 2011 team from Ocean View Little League remains the only team from Orange County to win the Little League World Series world championship.
That hasn’t changed. The players themselves? Well, they’ve grown up.
They were 12 years old at the time. Now, their ages have more than doubled to 26 and many of the players were able to make it to a special event Sunday at the Huntington Club.
The 2011 Ocean View Little League team was among the inductees into the inaugural class of the Huntington Beach Sports Hall of Fame.
“Coming back, it’s like we never left each other,” said Dylan Palmer, who played third base on the team. “That bond is very indescribable because we spent so much time together growing up. When I see one of the guys, we’re still best friends. We’re all laughing, joking, having fun like we’re 12 years old.”
The inaugural class also included Hall of Fame football tight end Tony Gonzalez, a Huntington Beach High graduate, and Ed Arnold, longtime broadcaster at KTLA and KOCE at Golden West College. Huntington Beach resident and trailblazing basketball player, general manager and announcer Ann Meyers Drysdale also was inducted, as were former world surfing champion Peter “PT” Townend and 12-time state champion Golden West College women’s volleyball coach Albert Gasparian.
Eight of the 13 players on the 2011 Ocean View team attended the ceremony. Some of the players wore adult-sized letterman jackets, which they were given after they won the title and they grew into over the years.
The team’s manager, Jeff Pratto, said his son Nick was unable to attend but shared that he and his wife, Hannah, welcomed a baby a couple of weeks ago.
“That’s the first offspring of the World Series champions,” Jeff Pratto said, to laughs from the crowd. “I think there will be many more.”
Steve Garvey and his daughter Olivia served as co-emcees of the Hall of Fame event, which had all seven Huntington Beach City Council members in attendance. Artist David Holbrook illustrated large portraits of each inductee.
Gonzalez, who is in New Orleans preparing to cover Super Bowl LIX, was unable to attend, but his mother Judy and former high school coach George Pascoe accepted on his behalf. In a video message, Tony Gonzalez thanked all of his coaches.
“It’s nothing when you don’t have the people around you that support you and that have been there since the beginning,” he said. “It’s all about that. Everybody have a great time, I wish I was I was there and that’s about it. H.B.!”
Meyers Drysdale was the the first woman to receive a four-year athletic scholarship from UCLA, and the first woman to sign a contract with an NBA team, which she did with the Indiana Pacers in 1979.
She had a quip for Garvey.
“I think Steve has been part of more Fourth of July parades than I have,” she said. “I’ve got to catch up to him.”
Townend, originally from Australia, said a couple of surfing memories from Surf City stood out to him. In 1984 he coached the U.S. national team, featuring fellow locals Janice Aragon and Scott Farnsworth, to a gold medal. And he also cherished the decade he spent coaching surfing at Dwyer Middle School, which resulted in three NSSA National Championships.
“This is really an honor,” said Townend, who got a bit emotional at the start of his speech.
Huntington Beach Sports Hall of Fame executive director Dave Garofalo, a former mayor of Huntington Beach, said his team has gathered a list of at least 200 more nominees for future classes of the hall.
“We have wrestlers, boxers, skateboarders,” Garofalo said. “In almost every sport known, we have somebody from Huntington Beach that is excelling in that particular area.”
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