Bob Keisser's Wednesday column on ex-Poly AD...

By Bob Keisser
Press-Telegram Sports Columnist
There are differences between Joe Carlson's current job and the one before it that he held for 16 years, but very few of them are subtle.
It's sort of like the difference between Paris, France, and Perris, California. More than just a few letters are different.
For 16 years, Carlson was at Long Beach Poly, the last 10 of them serving as athletic director. An inner-city school of almost 5,000 students, fielding teams in 23 varsity sports and their respective JV and freshman teams, with more than a century of sports lore and a rabid community of Jackrabbit fans who always have their own opinion to express, and who better to hear it than the athletic director?
He's now in his second year of his new job, an island compared to the bustling city of Poly.
In fact, it is an island.
Carlson in 2008 became the principal at Avalon, the K-to-12 Long Beach Unified school located on Catalina Island, 22 miles across the Pacific, or 26 miles according to the song made popular a half-century ago. It's an island 22 miles wide by 8 miles long, with a population of around 4,000.
Avalon currently has 650 students, 225 of them in high school. Carlson's duties now run the gamut from curriculum development to budgeting but he still has a healthy interest in an athletic program that's not even half the size of Poly's.
The Lancers field 10 sports -- football, baseball, softball, boys and girls soccer, basketball and volleyball and boys lacrosse. They play the 8-man version of football, too, which has its own charms for those who have never seen it.
Avalon has always been considered charming, but Carlson was surprised to find out how intimate the community is, especially coming from a Poly community that was tight even if it is large.
"The difference is huge, everything from the school being K-12 to the way everyone relates," he said. "When I was at Poly, I got to know a lot of people and you knew it was a real community. But this is really small, and you really do get to know everybody.
"We have fewer sports, so a lot of the kids play as many as three in a year's time. There were 55 seniors in June's graduating class, and 34 of them had been in school together since kindergarten. It has that old school house feel. It's like being in the middle of Kansas, only surrounded by water instead of cornfields."
With that kind of small-town support, too.
"The community is very supportive, amazingly so," he said. "We couldn't do what we do in the classroom or in athletics without the support we receive from the people who live here and the businesses -- service clubs, private donations, they make it so we can function."
The functioning process is much different, too.
Carlson's duties at Poly included putting together the security units necessary for athletic events, which included 37 people for some of the bigger Poly football games. "I am the security force here," he laughed.
"All this stuff I read about recruiting makes me laugh, because we don't have kids coming here to play sports. Most of the kids grew up here or their parents wanted to get them out of the city."
Unlike other schools, he's also dependent on boat schedules.
Teams take the Catalina Express across from the island -- daily departures at 8 a.m., 11:45 a.m. and 3:45 p.m. -- and then hop on buses for their road games. The Lancers play in the Express League, and their opponents are scattered all over Southern California. The football team played in San Juan Capistrano last weekend and meets Southland Christian in Walnut this Saturday.
On a good day, they'll have a day game like Saturday and make the trip in a day and not have to spend a night in a hotel.
The Lancers' boys soccer team reached new heights, and lengths, last season when they advanced to the Division VII title game, tying Rosamond, 1-1, before losing on penalty kicks.
To reach the title game, they had road playoff games in Mammoth Lakes and Bishop within a week of each other, with a home game in-between. Those were six-hour bus rides both times, not including the time spent taking the boat to Long Beach.
Carlson can handle the travel terrain. It's encouraging to see the athletic teams prosper in a community where everyone knows your name.
Last season's boys volleyball team reached the playoffs. The football teams in '07 and '08 each reached the second round of the playoffs before losing to Santa Clarita Christian, last year's team 9-0 before the loss. This year's team is 6-1 going into Saturday's game and led by Brian Ramirez (1,140 yards rushing, 25 TDs) and Carlos Cisneros (513 yards, 9 TDs).
"I'm getting to do and see things I've never done before," Carlson said. "Being principal has added a lot of texture to my job, but just as interesting is how amazingly committed people here are to their kids. It doesn't matter if you're the principal, a teacher or a custodian, you're all part of the same community.
"There's a sense of caring here that transcends most schools. Because when you have just 55 kids in a senior class, chances are you will really know who they are."
You will really know the boat schedules, too.
bob.keisser@presstelegram.comm