The Lincoln and Mission high school football teams faced off on Tuesday, almost five months after Turkey Day.It’s the same two schools that competed during the Thanksgiving tradition, but this game looks a lot different, and no, it’s not fútbol.
The football that is being played is the Academic Athletic Association’s inaugural season of girls’ flag football, the first varsity league of its type in California.
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Across all sports, postseason awards so often go to offensive stars.
Sportswriters, and even coaches, become enamored with the players that put points on the board, but can ignore the other half of the game. We won’t make that mistake.
That’s why Sacred Heart Cathedral senior Herman Pratt, the best defensive high school boys’ basketball player in San Francisco, is The San Francisco Examiner City Player of the Year.
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With standout junior guard Natalie Kelly, the International High School girls’ basketball team figured to be a Division V state championship contender.
But after the Jaguars lost Kelly for the season to a torn anterior cruciate ligament in her knee in mid-January, International still made it to the Division V Northern California semifinals because they had Shayna Mehta.
Mehta, a 5-foot-8 sophomore guard, averaged a city-best 23 points per game, 7.4 rebounds (second-best on the team) and four assists.
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SACRAMENTO – It's been said over and over – defense wins championships. No matter how good any defense is, though, you still have to put points on the board. The Sacred Heart Cathedral girls’ basketball team learned that lesson the hard way in the Division III state championship game Friday at Sleep Train Arena. In a span of 7 minutes against Bishop Alemany of Mission Hills in the second and third quarters, the Irish didn't score a point and it ultimately cost them in a 46-40 loss.
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SACRAMENTO – A whirlwind of swings and emotion sent the Division III boys' basketball state championship game to overtime, but it only delayed the heartbreak that is all too familiar to Sacred Heart Cathedral.
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Sacred Heart Cathedral boys’ basketball coach Darrell Barbour still hasn’t watched the film of the Division III state championship game from a year ago and he probably never will.
Sacred Heart’s 71-67 loss to Bishop Alemany still stings too much.
But now the Irish, with what many thought would be a diminished roster, will be back in Sacramento playing for another state title, this time against St. Augustine of San Diego on Friday at Sleep Train Arena.
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There is a common notion in many walks of life that you never want to follow a legend — you want to follow the guy that follows the legend.
It would be hard to find a better example of that than this year’s edition of the Sacred Heart Cathedral girls’ basketball team and first-year coach LyRyan Russell.
Under Russell, the Irish are back in their first state championship game since 2008 and they’ll take on Bishop Alemany, the Southern California bracket’s top seed, in the Division III title game Friday at Sleep Train Arena in Sacramento.
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There’s only one school in the state that has both its boys’ and girls’ basketball teams in state championships this weekend and it sits on Cathedral Hill in San Francisco.Sacred Heart Cathedral will send both teams to the Division III state championships Friday afternoon at Sleep Train Arena in Sacramento after winning NorCal championships on Saturday at American Canyon High School.The results for both teams were identical, but their experience were vastly different.
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As expected, the Riordan and Sacred Heart Cathedral boys’ basketball teams have advanced to their respective Northern California championship games.
Their opponents, however, will be significantly different.
Riordan (20-11), the No. 2 seed in Division IV, will take on Cardinal Newman of Santa Rosa, which boasts a 31-3 record and the top seed in the bracket, while the Irish (20-11) will take on Campolindo, a team that wouldn’t have even made the state tournament under last season’s system, in the Division III title game.
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You’d think the Sacred Heart Cathedral and St. Ignatius girls’ basketball teams would be tired of each other already.
The stakes of their fifth head-to-head matchup this season, however, provide a unique angle to The City’s supreme rivalry.
The Catholic-school rivals will play for the Division III Northern California championship and a spot in the state title game on Saturday at American Canyon High School and there is a clear favorite.
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Only a handful of San Francisco prep baseball players are currently at the Division I level of college competition and two of them sit about a foot away from each other in the Cal locker room.
Freshman Collin Monsour and redshirt sophomore Dylan Nelson, both in their first season at Cal, sit at adjoining lockers on the Berkeley campus and have become friends largely due to their common bonds.
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Riordan senior Geru Mabrey was starting to look like the goat in what could have been the last game of his high school career.
Down by a point to visiting Marin Catholic with 7.5 seconds on the clock in the Division IV NorCal boys’ basketball semifinals, Mabrey fumbled an inbound pass in Riordan’s half and scrambled to recover it.
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Lowell High School girls’ basketball coach Aki Kuwada talks a lot about complacency and for good reason.
In all eight of his seasons with the Cardinals, they have dominated the Academic Athletic Association and advanced to the California Interscholastic Federation Division I state playoffs, including this year, but they have yet to get past the second round of the Northern California bracket.
Like many public-school coaches, Kuwada feels that AAA players are highly motivated to win the San Francsico Section title, but seem to lose interest at the next level.
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The advent of the California Interscholastic Federation’s new Open Division state playoff system in boys’ and girls’ basketball has essentially accomplished two things.
It has created two monster tournaments, featuring the best teams in the state, while making several of the enrollment-division tournaments up for grabs, and no schools have benefited more than The City’s West Catholic Athletic League members.
The three city Catholic schools have been thrusted from being fringe contenders to outright favorites.
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Archbishop Riordan High School senior Elijah Davis made history by just stepping on the mat Saturday at Rabobank Arena in Bakersfield, but he just happened to be facing the wrestler that has become his nemesis.
Davis, in the 138-pound weight class, became the first male wrestler from a San Francisco high school to make his way to a state title match, but fell to Gilroy junior Nikko Villarreal by a 3-1 decision.
Just a week prior, Villarreal took down Davis in the Central Coast Section title match in triple overtime.
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