Colfax High among top storylines at CIF state basketball championships at Golden 1 Center
The season started in November, the preparation much earlier. Now, the grind concludes on Friday and Saturday at Golden 1 Center.
The CIF state basketball championships will be held in an NBA venue, home of the Sacramento Kings, and it is a grand way to finish things off. Some high school programs dotted across the state expected to be here, such as state-ranked powerhouses, but the brackets also include low-seeded upstarts with plenty to prove.
One Sacramento-area team remains in the running in the Colfax Falcons girls, who were the only regional program to make it this far a year ago. They do not have a roster of college recruits, but they hardly lack in talent, motivation and tradition.
At 34-2, Colfax bounds into Saturday’s Division II championship with the most wins of any of the boys and girls teams spanning six divisions. The Falcons seek the program’s first state crown in 40 years, not that there have been any bad seasons. Colfax has been in the postseason 41 consecutive seasons and is 5-1 all-time in Northern California championship games.
The Falcons are among seven storylines to ponder and follow, a champion for all small-school programs with homegrown kids doing big things.
Mighty Mitty
The top-ranked girls team in the country is a familiar name for those who even casually follow prep sports.
The Mitty Monarchs of San Jose roar in at 30-0, the only unbeaten squad in any of the brackets. They are tall, talented and a sight to behold, top-ranked in the state by Cal-Hi Sports with a showdown against state No. 2 Etiwanda (31-3) of Rancho Cucamonga on Saturday at 6 p.m. Etiwanda beat Mitty with a buzzer-beater a year ago.
Mitty is coached by Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame coach Sue Phillips, who played guard at Mitty in the 1980s and has logged a remarkable 30-plus year run. She has 819 victories, 16 Northern California championships and six state crowns to go with the program’s 32 Central Coast Section championships.
The star power includes McDonald’s All-American Morgan Cheli, headed to UConn, a star sophomore in McKenna Woliczko and a host of others. Mitty might just be the greatest girls team in Northern California history.
Son of former NBA star shines
One of the headliners will be Alijah Arenas, the son of retired NBA All-Star Gilbert Arenas. He has his pop’s penchant for scoring.
The younger Arenas is a sophomore guard for Chatsworth of the San Fernando Valley, and he went for 53 points and 11 rebounds in a Southern California Division IV semifinal win over Cleveland of Reseda.
Arenas is averaging 32.6 points a game a year after going for 30.3. Chatsworth plays Monterey on Saturday at noon.
Monterey road warriors
Speaking of Monterey, the Dores showed that a low seeding is ample fuel to find a way.
As the No. 14 seed in the NorCal D-IV field, Monterey (24-6) opened the tournament with a 67-51 win at Sierra of Tollhouse in Fresno County, a six-hour round trip spanning nearly 400 miles. Then it was a 58-34 victory at Lincoln of San Francisco, a two-hour one-way trek covering just over 110 miles, with traffic to add to the drudgery.
Monterey beat Natomas in Sacramento 64-61, traveling six hours round trip. Then on Tuesday in a regional final, the Dores headed to Union Mine in El Dorado County, a tidy one-way trip of nearly 230 miles, to deliver a 74-51 victory behind more relentless defense and offensive firepower, be it the fastbreak or 3-point shooting.
Caruthers floor burns
The Caruthers Blue Raiders hail from a small farming community in Fresno County and have their second girls team in a state final since 2019, clipping along at 24-8.
They play Granada Hills Charter on Friday at 2 p.m., having already gotten used to an NBA floor.
Caruthers plays home games in a rustic old venue at the county fairgrounds — some might call it a barn — and the floor has history. It was formerly used by the Phoenix Suns and every NBA great you can imagine. Local rancher Larry Trigueiro, whose kids attended the school, led a team of local investors to purchase the floor earlier this decade.
Oakland Tech name game
Oakland Tech has quite a team, rolling along at 29-5 with a 13-game winning streak heading into Saturday’s D-II contest against Centennial of Bakersfield. The Bulldogs are led by a guy with a name and game you cannot forget.
Junior guard Ardarius Grayson is averaging nearly 20 points and leads his squad with 6.9 rebounds, 5.0 assists and 2.6 steals.
He scored 34 points in a 73-66 semifinal win over rival Oakland, a game attended by Oakland native Damian Lillard, the Milwaukee Bucks All-Star guard.
Colfax’s Falcons fly
Colfax is a school of about 660 students where players for decades are the daughters of former Colfax players, who now coach and teach and work in the administration office.
And here they come again, ready to add to the trophy case with a D-II showdown against Harvard-Westlake, coached by an 800-game winner in Melissa Hearlihy.
Colfax is coached by a 102-game winner with 15 losses in Rexanne Simpton, The Bee’s Coach of the Year in 2023. Simpton was a Bee All-Metro guard for Nevada Union in the 1990s, when she went by her maiden name of Rodrigues. Now, she is a superb coach, big on fundamentals, defensive effort and cohesion.
She also can fire up the troops.
It seems opponents in the D-II bracket scoffed at the idea of having to play Colfax, and word leaked out. The Falcons downed Northern Section power Pleasant Valley of Chico in the NorCal final, days after PV stunned longtime powerhouse Oakland Tech on a buzzer-beater.
“It was extra motivating for us to know that Pleasant Valley thought the Oakland Tech game was the real championship game and that they were going to kill us,” Simpton said. “We had something to prove. When we set goals at the beginning of the season, one of them was to be known as a team that plays hard together and is respected.”
They are, win or lose Saturday.
Salesian team pride
Salesian of Richmond represents the North in the elite Open Division game, and it is every bit a team.
Not a single player averages double-figures in scoring for the Pride, which is 31-1 and has a 19-game winning streak. The coach is Bill Mellis, a mild-mannered sort in his 26th season. Salesian plays defending champion Harvard-Westlake to cap the weekend and season on Saturday at 8 p.m.
Harvard-Westlake is 31-3, top-ranked in the state by Cal-Hi Sports and led by McDonald’s All-American Trent Perry, who scored 42 points in a SoCal regional.
CIF state championships
All games at Golden 1 Center
Friday
10 a.m.: D-V Girls | Montgomery (25-11) vs. Oakland (22-10)
Noon: D-V Boys | Verdugo Hills (25-11) vs. Athenian (27-8)
2 p.m.: D-III Girls | Granada Hills Charter (21-11) vs. Caruthers (24-8)
4 p.m.: D-III Boys | Alemany (24-15) vs. Santa Cruz (27-6)
6 p.m.: D-I Girls | Bishop Montgomery (22-5) vs. Bishop O’Dowd (24-6)
8 p.m.: D-I Boys | St. John Bosco (27-7) vs. San Ramon Valley (29-7)
Saturday
10 a.m.: D-IV Girls | Grossmont (27-8) vs. St. Bernard’s (29-5)
Noon: D-IV Boys | Chatsworth (20-14) vs. Monterey (24-6)
2 p.m.: D-II Girls | Harvard-Westlake (18-18) vs. Colfax (34-2)
4 p.m.: D-II | Centennial, Bakersfield (28-7) vs. Oakland Tech (29-5)
6 p.m.: Open Girls | Etiwanda (31-3) vs. Archbishop Mitty (30-0)
8 p.m.: Open Boys | Harvard-Westlake (32-3) vs. Salesian (31-1)
This story was originally published March 7, 2024 at 12:38 PM.