Daily Pilot High School Male Athlete of the Week: Harris happy to blaze trail
The journey is new to the Pacifica Christian High boys’ basketball team. In its first varsity season, the small private school has traveled far to play.
Two vans get the 10 players and three coaches to games. In the last two rounds of the CIF Southern Section Division 6 playoffs, the Tritons logged close to 700 miles.
One player who is used to spending a lot of time on the road is Dominick Harris. The miles he and his teammates traveled are a typical week for Harris.
Seven hundred miles are how many Harris travels each school week. Out of the 95 students who attend Pacifica Christian, it will be hard to find someone on campus that has a longer commute to school each morning.
The miles and hours in traffic are all worth it to Harris and his family.
Harris lives with his mother, Neki, and father, Shawn, in Murrieta, about 70 miles away from the Newport Beach campus. The goal is to get out of the house by 4:45 a.m.
Dad does the driving, while the son sleeps.
“I don’t know if he got some more growing to do, but he can really get some sleep,” Shawn said with a smile. “He can eat and sleep.”
When he’s not resting or refueling, Harris is in the classroom or on the basketball court. Those long days have not affected Harris’ performance during his freshman year.
Shawn calls his son “a sleep monster.” When he wakes up and it’s time to play, Harris is also a monster on the court for the Tritons.
Harris’ motor never stops. At 6-foot-3, Harris can do a lot, score, rebound, pass, shoot, jump and play defense. He possesses the all-around game that can lead a young school like Pacifica Christian to the top.
Harris and the Tritons are one win away from playing for a section title. The school has only been around for two years, and on Friday, the No. 2-seeded Tritons (22-3) play host to No. 3 Ventura Foothill Tech (23-5) in the semifinals at 7 p.m.
The key reason behind the program’s success is Harris, the point guard. As for whether the Tritons could be so good so soon, Harris always believed it.
“I feel like Coach [Jeff Berokoff] trusted in me as a player and I trusted him as a coach,” Harris said. “I feel like [my teammates], they trusted in me, too, but I don’t know if they were aware of how far we were going to get.”
Not many programs reach this stage in their debut season on varsity.
Last season, before Harris arrived, the Tritons won one game out of 17 under Berokoff. They played a non-varsity schedule with only freshmen and sophomores at the school.
Seven of those nine players did not return this season, Berokoff said. A lot has changed since then at Pacifica Christian, as it unveiled a new court, a new team.
Everything about the program was fresh. That, along with the school’s Christian faith and academics, attracted the Harris family.
“I found out through my dad,” Harris said of Pacifica Christian. “He told me about it, and I wanted to go through the path of building something great. I believed in the process and I trusted God. [My dad is] a coach, so, you know, he has the connections.”
Enrolling Harris at Pacifica Christian also worked with his dad’s new work schedule as a coach. He landed a job in Costa Mesa, where he’s in his first season as an assistant coach with the Vanguard University men’s basketball team.
“It was just a perfect opportunity for me to be eight minutes away from catching a game, than have to get on the 91 [Freeway] and try to tough it out, if he played somewhere else,” said Shawn, adding that Temecula Rancho Christian, which is nearby where his family lives, was also a high school option for Harris.
Rancho Christian, like Pacifica Christian, is still playing at this point in the season. Rancho Christian plays at Capistrano Valley in the Division 2A semifinals on Friday.
Harris said he knows many of the players at Rancho Christian.
“They still want me to go [to Rancho Christian], but I tell them, ‘No,’” Harris said. “[There are] new opportunities, building blocks [at Pacifica Christian]. It’s like the bamboo tree. You build it from the root. That’s what I wanted to do.”
The first day Harris stepped inside of Pacifica Christian’s gym was in June. It looked and felt a lot different back then to Harris.
The school’s colors (Navy blue and orange), logo (P) and mascot (Tritons) weren’t painted on the court and on the walls.
“It was a little slippery. It was all right. It’s the gym,” said Harris, before telling himself, “I’m just ready to come here to work, and see what we got, see what we can do.”
Right away, Berokoff noticed Harris was a special player. He coached players with Harris’ talents before in Amateur Athletic Union basketball.
As a 15-year-old this past summer, Harris showed flashes of other players like Landry Fields and Solomon Hill Berokoff has worked with and have gone on to play in college and in the NBA.
“His feel for the game, how natural he moves with the basketball,” Berokoff said are what stood out about Harris, who has offers from Stetson University in Florida and California Baptist University in Riverside.
Other colleges following Harris are USC, Oregon, Texas, Georgetown, Kansas and Florida, said Berokoff.
Harris turned 16 on Jan. 3, and at his age, the numbers he is putting up are impressive. He’s averaging 26.1 points, 8.9 rebounds, 5.1 assists and 3.3 steals per game.
Harris is coming off a 43-point and 10-rebound effort at Carpinteria Cate on Tuesday. He made 13 of 21 shots, including five three-pointers, helping the Tritons win, 79-62, in the quarterfinals, their toughest game in the postseason.
The team’s biggest challenge in the playoffs so far has been getting to the second-round game at Santa Maria Valley Christian Academy last Friday.
“We left at 9 a.m.,” Berokoff said to make the 197-mile drive. “It was during the storm, so we had to drive slow and careful. We just beat the 101 [closure]. We just made it through. It took us all day to get up there.
“We’re probably the most traveled team in CIF this year.”
The long trips don’t bother Harris. He knows what to do when he’s stuck on the road. He sleeps, watches a movie on his tablet, or listens to music.
Harris is also thankful for his teammates. He is one of four freshmen starters, the others are Cal Whitney, Josh Sims and Timmy Bahadoor.
Whitney is averaging 18.5 points per game and Bahadoor 10.1 points, while Sims is averaging 8.2 points and 8.2 rebounds per game. The team is close, so close that after Tuesday’s late game 129 miles away in Carpinteria, the Bahadoor family let Harris stay the night at its home in Irvine.
All the driving can take a toll. Three months are how long Harris said it took him to adjust to the three-hour commute to school.
“I think he’s giving himself about 30 days of credit there. I say probably right before Christmas before I really [saw] that he was OK with it,” said Shawn, adding that after he drops off his son at school, he heads to the gym to work out and relieve stress from driving. “I’m really into big motivational things. During the ESPY [Awards last year], Kobe [Bryant] said something big. He was talking about [getting up at] 4 a.m. [to put in the work], about when you have big dreams of doing extraordinary things, and that doesn’t look normal to normal people, you got to do things that are over the top when you have a vision.
“I kind of told him that. He always admired Kobe’s work ethic. I said, ‘Hey, with the dreams and aspirations you have, it’s going to take us to do something unique.’”
Harris’ school is close to the beach. He said he’s been once or twice during his time at Pacifica Christian.
The good news is that Shawn and Neki said the family plans to move to Orange County in June. Maybe then, Harris can get to play in the sand and water, too.
Dominick Harris
Born: Jan. 3, 2001
Hometown: Murrieta
Height: 6-foot-3
Weight: 162 pounds
Sport: Basketball
Year: Freshman
Coach: Jeff Berokoff
Favorite food: Yellow curry
Favorite movie: “He Got Game”
Favorite athletic moment: “When I was [like 12], I hit a game-winner.”
Week in review: Harris led the Tritons to wins in the first two rounds of the CIF Southern Section Division 6 playoffs.
Twitter: @ByDCP
