There’s nothing easy about losing, and when it happens in such
an all-of-a-sudden way, trying to figure out what just happened can
leave the losing party asking meaningless questions for years to
come.
Believe me, I’m still wondering why Doug Edwards stopped running
the bases in the Little League championship 14 years ago. I have no
idea where Doug Edwards is, no idea what Doug Edwards is doing, and
yet I still think about Doug Edwards’ base-running inadequacies to
this day.
Last Wednesday’s Division I semifinal is going to sting a little while for the San Benito Lady Balers, with the way it transpired, with what was at stake, and with what happened in the championship game on Saturday night that followed.
San Benito led 24-13 with 5:30 remaining in the fourth quarter, and lost 25-24 to perhaps its biggest rival and a team that had defeated them twice already, North Salinas.
It was improbable and sudden. The Vikings finished the game on a 12-0 run, didn’t score their first basket of the fourth quarter until the five-minute mark, and led for all of 23 seconds of regulation.
At the final buzzer, the two teams couldn’t have been on further ends of the spectrum. And to make matters worse, at least for San Benito, North High cruised past No. 10 Menlo-Atherton 51-31 on Saturday night to claim the D-I title.
There’s nothing easy about losing, and when it happens in such an all-of-a-sudden way, trying to figure out what just happened can leave the losing party asking meaningless questions for years to come.
Believe me, I’m still wondering why Doug Edwards stopped running the bases in the Little League championship 14 years ago. I have no idea where Doug Edwards is, no idea what Doug Edwards is doing, and yet I still think about Doug Edwards’ base-running inadequacies to this day.
Thanks, Doug Edwards.
But agonizing about last Wednesday’s semifinal in similar fashion really doesn’t work, if only because San Benito did almost everything right and put itself in a situation to win.
Let’s be honest, the Lady Balers were not favored to win that game entering the contest. They were a 5-seed to North High’s 1-seed, and had previously lost twice to the Vikings by margins of 47-40 and 42-28.
Even the height differential was terribly one-sided.
But shutting down North Salinas from the start — it held the top-seeded team to just three points in the first quarter — San Benito kept a bigger Vikings team in check all game. They slowed down each offensive possession, forced 23 North High turnovers, and didn’t allow the Vikings to find any rhythm or spark off of which to build.
And while Doug Edwards literally stopped running the bases for some inexplicable reason, it took a once-in-a-lifetime type of comeback by the Vikings to finally pull ahead of the Lady Balers on Wednesday night.
Sure, thinking about it is going to sting for some time. But being in a position to win against a team that caught lightning in a bottle is certainly not something to agonize over, not when everything was left out on the floor.
Different year, same story
It seems like someone brings this argument up every year — myself included — but when is the Central Coast Section going to offer an Open Division for playoff basketball?
Currently the CCS only offers an Open Division in football, which pits the best eight teams in the section against one another, no matter what their school enrollment might be.
More often than not, the eight-team bracket is filled with private schools like Bellarmine and Serra and Valley Christian, as well as a very short list of the absolute best teams from among the public schools.
But really, much of the point with the Open Division is to pull up those private powerhouses from the lower divisions. If not, we’d get to see Valley Christian most likely wreak havoc year in and year out within the Division III ranks.
Basketball is quickly moving into a similar situation, though. This year, nine of the 10 boys teams which made it to the CCS finals were private schools, and all five division champions were private.
On the girls side, seven of the 10 teams which made it to the CCS championship round were private schools.
Along with football, basketball is really the only other sport the CCS offers where there is a noticeable difference in skills and ability between the public and private school teams. Having an Open Division in hoops would not only separate private from public, would not only feature a ridiculously exciting best-of-the-best bracket, but would also open up the lower divisions from having to compete against normally far-superior private school teams.
