Softball

winner the same way he won three state titles at Sabino High School, has had more difficulty with Arizona Western than any other junior college opponent. Here's why: AWC can't expect to fill its roster with Yuma-area players. So it has become a repository for major-college players, and in doing so, essentially became a national-level program. Last season, Arizona Western's roster included 10 players from Florida, five from California, three from North Carolina, and two each from Pennsylvania, Alabama, Missouri, Idaho, New Jersey and Colorado. No wonder Scurran hasn't been able to beat AWC in a numbers-driven sport like football. Arizona Western offers room, board and tuition waivers. Pima, in all sports, can only waive tuition for its leading athletes. Pima's incoming recruiting class includes 36 Southern Arizonans, plus a handful from Alaska and Utah. Does it matter if Pima is a laughingstock? Will anybody really care outside of a bare garrison of PCC fans? Junior college athletics are rarely a good draw in a metropolitan area of Tucson's size. But every time the Aztecs have produced a World Series baseball team, under Rich Alday or Roger Werbylo, the school's public image soared. The feel-good fuzzies were everywhere. When Olympian Abdi Abdirahman became one of the nation's two or three leading distance runners, it was all traced to his days as an Aztec. Sometimes, the only Pima College news items to hit print in a month's time are linked to Aztec sports. Flores' stated goals are indeed noble. He does not want to use taxpayer money to pay for sports. He prefers a Tucson-first approach to participation. That's ideally wonderful. It's an Ivy League attitude - in a league without Ivy League opponents. Yavapai, a basketball power in Prescott, won the ACCAC men's championship this season with a rotation that included players from Michigan, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Nevada and Phoenix. The Roughriders beat the mostly Tucson PCC team twice, averaging 109 points per game. It's not going to change much. The undeniable pressure on PCC coaches is to retain Tucson's leading high school athletes who are not absorbed by four-year schools. Here's how difficult that is: the ACCAC's three best baseball teams this year - CAC, Cochise College and South Mountain - all had at least four top Tucson kids in their lineups. South Mountain was able to take Sunnyside's Luis Cota, the ACCAC's Player of the Year with a 12-0 pitching record, because it offered him room, board and tuition. Cota's older brother, Jesus, a star in the Diamondbacks' farm system, was a standout at PCC two years ago, but the family connection and the hometown buzz could not match South Mountain's offer. Flores' base idea is a good one: be economical and be local. It might work in sociology and calculus, but in a sports perspective, it's a doomsday scenario.