Hillcrest Christian's Martino Has a Bounce to His Step

By ERIC SONDHEIMER

Jan. 31, 2001 12 AM PT

When LAPD patrol cars are cruising back to the Devonshire Division at around 10:30 p.m. and pass Northridge Park, the officers become suspicious about a lone teenage boy hovering outside the gym.

“Sometimes they look at me,” Alex Martino said. “Sometimes they slow down to see what I’m doing.”

No one would blame the officers if they rolled their eyes in disbelief.

“It’s kind of awkward for a kid to be out there in the park at 10:30 p.m. dribbling the ball,” Martino said.

Martino is a 17-year-old junior point guard at Hillcrest Christian School in Granada Hills. People around Northridge Park know him as “The Basketball Fanatic.”

He lives across the street and usually drops by the park after two hours of practice with his high school team. If he had a key to the park gym, “I’d be there all night,” he said.

He practices his passes by throwing the ball off a wall next to the gym or works on his dribbling skills picked up from watching a Pete Maravich video.

He doesn’t need a watch to remind him what time to come home. Martino goes home after his mother screams from down the street, “Al-ex, Al-ex.”

“She just goes outside and yells my name,” he said.

He has been known to practice his dribbling in the rain, and his coach at Hillcrest Christian, Joshua Kendrick, confesses, “It just seems like he was born with a basketball in his hand.”

Martino, who is 6 feet 1, has led Hillcrest Christian to a 12-3 record and 7-0 mark in the Westside League. The school has 800 students in grades K-12, with 160 boys and girls in grades 9-12. The Eagles made it to the Southern Section Division V-A semifinals last season and will move up to V-AA this season.

Since he was in junior high, Martino has treated a basketball as if it were a teddy bear. He doesn’t sleep with one, but if he isn’t holding one it’s unusual.

“I used to dribble from class to class, before class, after class,” he said. “I’d palm the ball inside class as long as the teacher didn’t get mad.”

Junior high teachers used to confiscate his basketball, telling him, “You shouldn’t be bringing play objects into class.”

But he considers himself a student of basketball. He tapes Laker games so he can study Kobe Bryant’s dribbling.

“When the Lakers were in the playoffs, I’d tape the game and dissect what Kobe did,” he said. “I’d put it in slow motion, write the move down and go practice. He has a real good spin dribble when he gets into traffic, and I saw when he spun through the middle against the defense, he’d keep the ball real close to his chest like a running back. I’d try to copy him.”

He watches his Maravich videos like a student learning from a professor.

“I didn’t know who he was,” Martino said. “I heard he was the first flashy guy. I liked him because he made up his own stuff. He added flash to the game and he had a lot of good dribbling skills.”

If Martino ever needs a playing companion, he can recruit his twin sister, Felicia, starting point guard for Hillcrest’s girls’ team.

“We do everything the same almost,” he said. “I teach her everything I do and she sometimes teaches me.”

Martino is averaging 12 points. He sometimes wonders how he’d do playing for a larger school, but he has adjusted to the comments he hears from opponents at the park when he tells them he attends Hillcrest and they ask, “Where’s that?”

All Kendrick knows is that few point guards are better at breaking full-court presses than Martino.

“He can dribble through any press we’ve seen,” Kendrick said.

Martino is no Jason Williams of the Sacramento Kings, known as White Chocolate, but he has picked up the nickname Whipped Cream.

“The ball is like an extension of my hands,” he said.

Mike Mgdesyan, a 5-11 senior point guard at Poly averaging 17 points, is the latest to experience the American dream.

He came to California from Armenia when he was 4, speaking no English and facing a culture shock. Today, he has 4.3 grade-point average and wants to become a lawyer.

He was cut from his fifth-grade basketball team, came back the next year to make the team and hasn’t been out of the lineup since. Hard work tells the story of his success.

“As a ninth grader, I couldn’t hit a three-point shot to save my life,” he said.

As a senior, he has made 49 three-pointers.

“I shoot 200 to 300 jumpers every weekend,” he said.

He’s part of Poly’s math, science and technology magnet. He has taken college courses for two years, which will allow him to enter college next fall as a sophomore. He has applied to various UC campuses and is more nervous waiting for his acceptance letters than shooting a free throw to win a game.

“I’m killing myself every night,” he said. “You say your prayer and go to sleep, ‘Please, God, don’t disappoint me.’ ”

He remains grateful to his parents for their decision to bring him and his younger brother and sister to America.

“They just want me to be a good person inside,” he said. “They showed me that education is the key to success.”

A 13-team high school baseball tournament is scheduled for Saturday and Sunday at Sylmar, Birmingham and Saugus. It will be the final winter tournament before the high school season begins at the end of February. Games are also scheduled the following weekend.

Chatsworth, Kennedy, Cleveland, Birmingham, Sylmar, Granada Hills, La Canada, Saugus, Grant and North Hollywood are among the schools with players participating. . . .

Chris Martinez, former Chaminade second baseman, helped Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to a 4-0 start. He’s six for 10 with five runs batted in. . . .

Sophomore Kyle Williams has won the starting shortstop position at Burroughs. He’s moving up from junior varsity and is highly regarded after hitting .413 in summer Palomino ball. “He’s very acrobatic,” Coach Jose Valle said. . . .

To become managers for Chaminade’s girls’ soccer team and beat out close to a dozen candidates, baseball players T.J. Franco and Jason Tufeld had to engage in some creative thinking to impress the voters. Franco ran around the track shirtless with player uniform numbers painted on his back. Tufeld shaved his leg to say, “Girls soccer,” and shaved his arm to say, “CIF champs.”

Eric Sondheimer’s column appears Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at (818) 772-3422 or [email protected].