playoff observations

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SoCalHoops High School News

CIF-SS Playoff Notes, Tidbits &
Assorted Stuff--(Feb. 12, 2002)

Some of the things we picked up at the CIF-SS seeding on Sunday at Gahr HS:

Two Most Upset Coaches--While various news reports in local papers claimed that everyone was happy with their draws and that there were no upset coaches or hard feelings, evidently the reporters who made such pronouncements missed the chance to speak with either Ray Lokar, head coach at Bishop Amat, or with Kevin Reynolds of Villa Park. Both of their teams received somewhat-less-than-favorable first round draws and/or placement in their respective brackets.

While it's hard to figure out though how Reynold's Villa Park team could have gotten any different treatment given the numbers of tough teams they could have had to face, it's hard to imagine a tougher road to the finals than the one which Villa Park would have to make if they hope to make it to the finals: In the first round they get Chaparral (15-13) which is an at-large entry from the Southwestern League....ok, so far so good. But if VP makes it to the second round, they get the winner of Newport Harbor v. Loara, and then look forward to the prospect of playing Inglewood in the quarterfinals, while looking forward to a semifinal match against either No. 2 seed Pasadena or Claremont, Santa Barbara, or a number of other good opponents. And then of course, there's always Mater Dei or Corona Centennial in the other half of the bracket as the two most likely teams to wind up in the finals from that half....

But if anyone's got a beef, it's probably Lokar's Bishop Amat team, which is the No. 4 seed in Division III-AA, and which pulled a first round matchup with Monrovia, which finished the record with a deceptively mixed 14-13 record. Of course, what the seeding committee was likely unaware of at the time they matched these two teams was that Bryant Markson (6'-8" Sr. F) from Monrovia had missed all of his team's games since January 6 when he reinjured his knee. What they also probably weren't aware of is that Markson was going through rehab, was getting stronger, and in fact came back to play for Monrovia in his team's final regular season game against Temple City, a game which wound up with a hugely lopsided win for Monrovia. In that game, Markson, Monrovia's two-time defending League MVP, a Utah-signee and consensus All-San Gabriel MVP scored 28 points and 11 rebounds, includng 10 straight points in the second quarter, and his huge dunk in the third quarter capped a 15-0 Monrovia run. This is definitely a different Monrovia team with Markson than without him, and with Bryant back in the lineup, it changes everything. Should be fun though to see two Division I signees, with Bishop Amat's LMU-bound Jonathan Haywood and Markson matching up. As we said, this is the kind of matchup that no one expects to see in the first round....maybe the quarters, certainly not until the semis. Should be quite a game.

Everyone's In....Sorta, Kinda--

As Ben Bolch of the LA Times reported (at least we thought Ben reported this on Monday) every team that petitioned for an at-large berth in the playoffs got in....and five boys teams that were eligible to do so (Long Beach Jordan, Santa Ana Foothill, Keppel, La Serna and Murrieta Calvary Chapel) didn't file petitions, a fact we confirmed on Sunday with Paul Castillo, the Assistant Commissioner of Basketball. But there were a couple of close calls, and on the girls' side of things, it didn't go nearly as well as it did for the boys.

Warren boys in, Los Al girls out.

Seems that Los Alamitos girls' team, which finished 5th in the Sunset League and thus out of contention for an automatic berth, failed to file its paperwork on time. When the Division I-A girls bracket was set, the Griffins weren't included. You may have noticed the messages on the SoCalHoops message board on Sunday night after the brackets were released. Coaches and others assumed that the CIF would rectify the oversight, and let Los Al into the playoffs.

But school administrators and coaches, accompanied by a contingent of players, parents and other team boosters, met at the CIF-SS office on Monday morning for over an hour in an effort to persuade the CIF-SS officials to let the team participate, and were told "Sorry, no can do."

CIF Bylaws and the Playoff Handbook both state that if a team intends to petition to gain entry into the playoffs, all paperwork had to be submitted to the CIF-SS office by not later than Saturday, February 9, 2002 at 9:00 a.m. And that just wasn't done in this case. By Sunday, the brackets had been released, and on Monday, schools and coaches were making arrangements for travel, ticket sales and the like. The odds that the CIF would have corrected a problem as glaring as paperwork which was not delivered at all (forget about just being late on Saturday or Sunday, it evidently wasn't ever submitted until Monday morning), diminished with each passing hour after the deadline.

And so on Monday, the CIF-SS stood fast, and refused to change the brackets. In year's past, other teams have submitted late paperwork and been excluded from the playoffs, and this fact had been widely publicized. The warnings to A.D.'s in the playoff handbooks was well known and, after all, rules are rules. And so the sentiment at the CIF was evidently that no exceptions could be made. We feel bad for the girls who worked as hard as they did, and are sympathetic to their plight, but the reality is that someone goofed and it's kids who are paying the price, not the adults who created the mess. What a shame.....

The case of the Los Al girls, while a sad way to end the season, is a bit different than what happened with the Warren boys' team, and there's a happy ending (or beginning, since we're only talking about the first round of the playoffs). When the brackets were first released for the Boys' Division IA bracket, Warren was nowhere to be seen. Warren finished 4th in the six-team San Gabriel Valley league, with a record of 14-12, 4-6 (actually they tied with Gahr at 4-6, but lost the tie-breaker), and so had to petition....

Warren's coach was present on Sunday at the release of the brackets, and immediately noticed the error, and after locating the paperwork (which had in fact been timely submitted), a space in the bracket was created by giving the Bears a wild-card game in the first round, moving Edison (Sunset League #3) out of their first round matchup with Rowland, and creating a Warren v. Edison wildcard game, with the winner meeting Rowland in the first round.

A fine and easy solution.

And Are They In the Right Divisions?

When the Division V-AA brackets came out, one team that was nowhere to be found was South Bay Lutheran which finished with a record of 11-3, 9-1, and tied with Orangewood Academy in league for 1st place. Orangewood is a V-A team by enrollment, while South Bay Lutheran has 161 students and is a V-AA team by enrollment....or at least they should be. Since both teams should have been entered in different brackets, they were both entitled to be designated as No. 1 teams in their respective brackets.

But evidently the league representative who submitted the paperwork to the CIF-SS confused things, and designated them both as V-A teams, employed a tie-breaker, and designated So. Bay as the No. 2 team. The CIF-SS seeding committee was evidently none the wiser either, went along with the mistake, and placed So. Bay in the V-A bracket....Which is where they remain now, set for a first round matchup with undefeated (17-0) Zinsmeyer Academy, the No. 4 team from the Freedom League (well, ok, they finished 8-0 in league and tied with Whitewater...so how are they a No. 4 in league? Hey, yet another error?). By the time the first error was spotted, it was too late to change the brackets, so there they remain.

Of course none of this will mean anything unless So. Bay Lutheran knocks off a Zinsmeyer, or some other contender in V-A or makes it to the finals, and then you'll hear people screaming. But if they don't, then it's likely not going to matter, and according to our sources at the CIF-SS, the feeling by the end of the day Sunday was that regardless of where the Southern Section placed a team within subdivisions, all of these teams wind up either losing somewhere along the line or if they ultimately win a section title or are runners up, they get mixed together anyway in the State tournament in the overall divisions.

And speaking of the Freedom league teams, Whitewater almost had a similar fate and could have wound up in the wrong division. All year they had been ranked in the V-A polls. Whitewater for those who don't know, is a California Youth Authority school, a single-gender, boy's only school, with an enrollment of 75. So, they were placed in V-A, which is where a team with 75 students in the school would wind up. Except that single-gender enrollment is supposed to be doubled, meaning Whitewater should have been in V-AA.

In the last week before the brackets were released, someone spotted the fact that the CIF had not doubled the enrollment as required, and made the correction, moving them to V-AA.