Capital Christian wants to win CIF basketball championship before Destiny Church takeover
In Michael Lorente’s office, there hangs a large framed image of Michigan, the city of Detroit glistening in the twilight.
That region is his home, his roots, but Lorente’s heart is here, in Sacramento. The pulse includes his cozy office setting on the campus of Capital Christian High School, located just south of Rancho Cordova off Highway 50. Basketball and family photos are dotted across his desk, walls and on bookshelves.
And there’s the gym, where Lorente is in his element as the never-idle or quiet basketball coach, mentoring, plotting, barking, preaching and producing results for a team riding a 12-game winning streak. Change is coming to Capital Christian with Destiny Church set to take over this summer, but there’s work to do now. The Cougars bound into the Sac-Joaquin Section Division II playoffs as the No. 2 seed with plenty to prove. Capital Christian on Wednesday will host Granite Bay, which defeated Ceres in Monday’s outbracket game.
Basketball saved Lorente as a kid in Michigan, where he endured four years of foster homes, bouncing from one house to another. The one thing that didn’t reject him was a ball, and the one place he knew he could hold his own was on a court. Today, the 44-year-old coach has a soft spot for teenagers who can relate to broken homes and tough times, kids who crave coaching and structure.
“Basketball was my out and it was my family,” Lorente said.
Basketball coaching, the continuous grind, took its toll on Lorente in California years ago, he said.
“It cost me my first marriage,” he said.
Lorente remarried, to Andrea, whom Capital Christian players adore and call “Coach Mom.” The couple’s 10-year-old son, Santino, is a regular at games, a ham for any photo or video team shoot.
Lorente is living the good life with one heck of a team to lead. He is an example of stops-and-starts with favorable ending results, much like a game. He bombed out of college in his first attempt before returning to graduate from Sacramento State and gaining extra degrees to teach. He has coached all over locally: as an assistant at local community colleges American River and Cosumnes River; as an assistant at Capital Christian from 2004-07 and as a head coach at Rocklin from 2010-12, where he was humbled a bit by losses and expectations.
But Lorente never broke stride and never lost faith. In the spring of 2020, he gleefully returned to Capital Christian, where his aim is to lead a powerhouse program while doubling as the school’s director of admissions.
“We had to ask ourselves, where do we want to be as a basketball program? Go back to Division 4 or 5 and be great at the small-school level, or be big at the large-school level?” Lorente said. “We want to play the best to be the best, and we have a team this year that can do some special things.”
A school some love to hate
Lorente is at a school some people love to hate. This is not uncommon for a private school used to varying degrees of success or exhibiting any semblance of thumbing their noses at conventional wisdom or mandates.
The basketball Cougars do not care about any of that. They have a singular focus of competing, backed by a spirited student body of 365 that is reflective of their campus as a melting pot of diversity. Capital Christian is 21-7, anchored by a junior point guard star in 6-foot-3 Jaylen Valdez, who is averaging 19.3 points. And there is the sight of promising 6-5 sophomore post Myles Wiggins, who can run the floor, dunk, post up and shoot. He can also light up a room with his smile, if you’re not checking out his 7-1 wingspan and size 17 feet.
Six of the team’s losses were to out-of-section or state powerhouse programs, a schedule designed to challenge the troops with some fun travel and team bonding blended in. The local loss was 85-84 to D-III top seeded Sacramento High in overtime last month. Capital Christian won the rematch emphatically, 71-48, on Jan. 31 at home and went on to win the Capital Athletic League.
A showdown in the section D-II finals at Golden 1 Center on Feb. 21 against top-seeded Jesuit is the goal, and what a clash that would be between private-school powers.
Jesuit is the old guard, hanging up championship banners across the board since nearly the time it opened in Carmichael in 1963. Capital Christian opened in 1977, and by the 1980s, the Cougars were hosting basketball playoff games on their blue carpeted floor. It was a sight as odd as it sounded. There were no sounds of sneakers squeaking off the hardwood or even the sound of the ball bouncing on wood.
All these years later, Capital Christian’s venue looks the part of a championship program. There are championship banners recognizing section title teams of the past, from the D-4 or D-5 ranks to the 2013 team that played in D-1 and featured D.J. Wilson, a 6-10 star from who played at Michigan before becoming a first-round NBA draft pick.
End of an era for Capital Christian
But for all of its glorious past, including the softball team winning its first CIF section and Northern California banners last spring, a dramatic change is coming. Capital Christian is in the midst of a church takeover. The school will remain on its current site, but starting this summer the name will be changed to Destiny Christian Academy, home of the Lions.
Those banners may come down. The school colors will change. The words Capital Christian and Cougars and any mascot paintings or photos will be taken down, but not thrown out. That’s history, and history is to be cherished.
Capital Christian administrators such as Chris Orr embrace the idea of change and a feel-good vibe. In recent years, the school has endured lawsuits from coaches whose contracts were voided. The school also took on the California Interscholastic Federation, the state’s governing body for high school sports, to contest sanctions after fielding a club football team during the COVID year, violating CIF rules. The football team was barred from the playoffs for one season.
Declining enrollment and coaching turnover led to the end of two campus championship programs in baseball and girls basketball. Baseball is back and the girls hoops program expects to return next season. Just when everything looks gloomy at 3401 Mayhew Roard in Rosemont, here’s Lorente to assure you it’s not so bad.
“It’s always darkest before dawn,” Lorente said. “We’ve turned the corner as a school. This basketball team now, it’s our ray of light. They’ve done everything right. Great kids. Good team GPA of 3.4. We have great kids and teachers here and excellent leadership. This is a good place to be, and changes do happen.”
Valdez, the smooth floor leader, agreed.
“I love it here,” he said. “We all like the teachers and the coaches.”
‘Old wise owls’
The coaches include two relics, including Phil Oates, the former Cougars head coach who is so revered here that the gym bears his name. That signage could come down with the new change, though Lorente said he’ll find a bucket of nails and put it back up.
Oates is as fond of Lorente as Lorente is of Oates.
“It’s great having Lorente back here,” Oates said. “He’s back home.”
Oates is the Chairman of the Board for Buzz Oates Associates, a leading commercial real estate developer in the valley. Buzz Oates, his father, owned the land that Capital Christian took over in 1977. Perpetually upbeat and friendly, Oates is also a minority owner of the Sacramento Kings, so basketball is very much in his heart and blood.
Another Cougars assistant coach is 74-year-old Tom Abatemarco, a coaching lifer if there ever was one. He started his college coaching career in 1974, and his 20 stops across the country include heading Sacramento State from 1997-2000 and assisting the Sacramento Monarchs of the WNBA from 2003-08. He was on the bench next to Jim Valvano in 1983 when North Carolina State won the NCAA championship.
Abatemarco has been delighted to be a stat keeper and a reminder of fundamentals in practices, such as boxing out.
“Those are our old wise owls,” Lorente said of Oates and Abatemarco. “The kids love them. Tom was telling a story of recruiting Michael Jordan when he was an assistant at NC State, and they all leaned in to listen. Great stuff.”
Transfers in and out
Capital Christian isn’t for everyone, certainly. Coaches have come and gone. Players have left, too, including guards Gavin Sykes after last season. He leads lead D-I top-seeded Modesto Christian in scoring.
Capital Christian gained transfers in guard/forward CJ Willenborg of Folsom, averaging 11.4 points, and, in recent weeks, SirMister Harriel of Antelope, a promising freshman who will not play this season due to his late transfer.
On both instances of the incoming transfers, Lorente immediately reached out to the players’ previous coaches to ensure the students came his way without any influence.
“I’m not the right coach for everyone,” Lorente said. “I’m not going to beg a kid to stay. My job is not to be your friend. I will challenge you to be the best you can be. We love the kids we have. We’re playing our best ball right now, and we’re excited. Some of the kids are talking about winning a title now in the final year of Capital Christian and another next year as the new school. You never know, but wouldn’t that be something?”
This story was originally published February 14, 2024 at 5:00 AM.