Orange County Prep Review : Brea-Olinda’s Road to Title May Be Hardest

Of the Orange County teams remaining in the CIF Southern Section boys’ basketball playoffs--Mater Dei and Edison in the 5-A, Capistrano Valley in the 4-A and Brea-Olinda and Katella in the 3-A--Gene Lloyd’s Wildcats appear to have the toughest road to a title.

Not only did Brea have to beat defending 3-A champion Morningside last Friday, but it now inherits top-seeded Ganesha, a team that is 27-1 with its only loss coming by one point.

With the Brea girls’ team still alive in the playoffs this Tuesday, the Brea boys’ game against Ganesha will be Wednesday at Chino High School at 7:30 p.m.

If Brea beats Ganesha, it would set up some interesting possibilities in then 3-A final. A Brea-Katella final would pit two North County powers and their big men (the Wildcats’ Kevin Walker and the Knights’ Bob Erbst) against each other.

Or, a Brea-Hacienda Heights Wilson matchup would pit Walker against center Scott Williams, who has committed to play basketball at North Carolina.

Not only was Wilson one of only four teams to beat Brea this season (in a Christmas tournament game that Walker missed because of an injury), but Wilson Coach Mike Lowe played for Lloyd 10 years ago and was a longtime assistant at Brea after that.

Lloyd has noted that as the playoffs progress, the officials are calling a different game, and that has been working to the Wildcats’ advantage.

“It appears to me that they’re calling games extremely tight now,” he said. “Other teams have tried to negate Walker’s effect by just pounding on him, but the referees we’ve had thus far have not allowed that to happen.

“We’ve had a lot of other players foul out against us and Walker has shot a lot of free throws.

“The other thing I’ve noticed is that the refs are really stressing that the kids on the court won’t be allowed to talk back to them, either.”

In last Friday’s 78-55 quarterfinal victory over Morningside, the Monarchs were hit with a bench technical and a player technical for talking back to the referees. Walker was hit with a technical late in the game as well.

Details, details: If you think that coaching high school basketball is limited to worrying about just the X’s and O’s of the game, forget it.

Larry Sunderman, now the women’s coach at Orange Coast College, coached the Estancia boys’ team to the final four three times during his tenure as coach of the Eagles from 1978-84.

Sunderman offered these gems as to how he and then-assistant coach Joe Reid, the current coach at Estancia, prepared their team for key playoff games:

- “If we played on a Tuesday, we would scout the area we were playing in on a Monday and find a good shopping mall with a restaurant that the team would enjoy eating at.

“We’d make reservations and take the team to eat there on game day. Then we’d let them walk off the meal at the mall before going to the gym.

- “We’d always get to the gym an hour and a half before game time, so Joe and I would make up a schedule from 7:30 game time on back: 7:30 tipoff, 7:10 warmups, 6:55 chalk talk in the locker room and so on.”

- “At the pregame shootaround, we used bank-shooting drills to get used to the backboard and if the other team wasn’t out yet, we’d practice shooting free throws at both rims just in case they were at different angles.”

- “If we wanted to say something to the kids, we’d say it at the team meal, when we had them all together. Plus we’d always bring along four or five of the younger kids (junior varsity or freshmen) just to give them a feel for the excitement of it all.”

- “You have to take the pressure off the kids--tell them that this is what we’d worked toward since summer league ball, since preseason. We’d tell them to have fun. Even now when I see some of my old players, the first thing they mention is the time we played this playoff game at the Long Beach Arena or that one at the Sports Arena.”

Little wonder Sunderman was such as successful prep coach. His is a name that the prep game in the county will always miss.

Try the lottery?: One last story about Jack Errion, the basketball coach at Corona del Mar who announced his retirement over the weekend after 36 seasons of coaching.

When he was coaching at St. Anthony of Long Beach prior to Corona del Mar, Errion and his assistants figured out every possible team that they might face in the playoffs one year and came up with a total of 31.

Within a few weeks, Errion and company managed to scout 30 of those 31 teams.

So what happened?

“We drew the 31st team, Centennial, the one we didn’t scout, and they beat us in the first game,” Errion said.

Playoff fever: The Brea-Olinda boys’ soccer team’s Southern Section 2-A playoff game against Monrovia will be played at Brea at 6 p.m. Tuesday.

Brea (16-2-4) is the top seed in the division and Monrovia (16-4-1) is No. 4.

Soccer Coach Manny Toledo

proudly notes that the Brea boys’ soccer team, boys’ basketball team and girls’ basketball team are all still vying for Southern Section championships.

“ Some body from our school is bound to get one,” he said. “All three of those teams went undefeated in their Orange League play, too.”

Knights of the Square Table: If you think that high school wrestlers aren’t as intelligent as those in other sports, well, think again. Consider that at the Southern Section Masters Meet at Westminster Saturday, while five mats were full of constant action, two wrestlers from Charter Oak quietly wiled away their time in the stands by playing chess.

Add wrestling: It just doesn’t seem as if you can hold a wrestling meet in the county and call it important without John Dahlem being there.

Dahlem, the former Loara coach who won 10 Empire League titles and a Southern Section 4-A title with the Saxons, was at the Masters meet making the rounds.

Instead of fretting about scores and wrestlers making weight as all of the other coaches were, Dahlem was free to enjoy the matches and kibitz with all of his old wrestling cronies.

Dahlem had this to say about Steve Lawson, the undefeated 195-pounder from El Dorado, who is favored to repeat as state champion this week: “Lawson just destroys people. He’s as dominant a wrestler as we’ve had in Orange County for a long, long time. He’s a real character, too--he’s a neat kid to be around or to coach.”