The High Schools : Steele’s Dunk Made Playoff Victory Ironclad

It was one of those “you had to be there to believe it” kind of moments.

“It’s hard trying to explain it,” El Camino Real assistant Jeff Davis said.

It was a demonstrative dunk, a wham of a jam--the stuff of which yarns are spun. It was a two-handed, on the run, ball-behind-the-head net-shredder by El Camino Real’s Jason Steele.

Steele threw down his best stuff to open the fourth quarter of the Conquistadores’ 72-57 City Section 3-A Division playoff opener Friday night against visiting Lincoln.

El Camino Real led, 32-19, at halftime but stood sluggishly by as Lincoln narrowed the gap to 44-41 after three quarters.

Steele’s dunk triggered a three-minute, 12-2 run to put El Camino Real back in the driver’s seat.

More importantly, however, it sent a signal to his teammates, and not a moment too soon. Brent Lofton and rest of the Conquistadores responded by scoring 28 points--a team season high for a quarter.

Lofton, a senior forward, posted season highs of 33 points and 19 rebounds to lead El Camino Real (10-8) into Wednesday’s second round against visiting Jefferson.

Lofton was 13-of-18 shooting and seven of eight from the free-throw line, including five of five in the fourth quarter.

“He just went wild,” Davis said. “He came through and hit the shots when we needed him to hit them.”

Lofton, however, credited Steele, who finished with 11 points and 10 rebounds, with shifting the game’s momentum.

“We’ve kind of had an up and down season,” Lofton said. “But that dunk kind of changed things around. All the fans went wild.”

Charlie Crow followed Steele’s dunk with consecutive steals and Lofton capped the rally with a timely tip-in that drew a foul, resulting in a three-point play.

“It was like before you knew it-- Boom! “ Davis said. “They called time out, but it didn’t matter. They couldn’t stop it.”

Said Lofton: “I wanted to win, I didn’t want to go home yet. That might have been my last high school game. But if we hadn’t gotten that dunk, we might have gone home.”

Quick exits: Of six Valley-area City Section 3-A Division playoff teams, El Camino Real is the lone survivor.

Of four 4-A Division area teams, only Cleveland remains.

Friday’s playoffs seemed to confirm what many might have believed before the season began: It was a down year for basketball in the Valley.

Of 25 area playoff teams, 19 were defeated, including Notre Dame, North Hollywood, Taft, Grant, Kennedy, Granada Hills and Burroughs--all ranked in The Times’ Valley Top 10 poll.

Option run: Darn that Russell White. Just when Marty Holly thought he had everything planned, along comes White to spoil everything.

“I was thinking of going to Cal,” said Holly, a senior tailback for Harvard. “But Russell White’s going there, so I’d have a little competition.”

White, Crespi’s splendid tailback and the state’s all-time leading rusher, announced last week after much speculation that he would attend Cal in the fall. Holly, who rushed for 2,082 yards over the past two years, admittedly is no Russell White.

But then White, is no Marty Holly--on the soccer field, anyway.

Holly, who has a team-high 19 goals, scored his fourth waning-minutes game-winner as Harvard (13-9-1) topped Oak Park, 1-0, Friday in the first round of the Southern Section Small Schools playoffs.

Plan B for Holly is a college soccer career. Holly has attracted the interest of Occidental, Pomona-Pitzer and Stanford, as well as several eastern schools, including Georgetown and Dartmouth.

Although his first choice remains football, Holly said, soccer is increasingly becoming attractive--even at Cal. “If football doesn’t work out,” he said, “I probably will play soccer. I have a brother at Berkeley. He wants me to come up there.”

Astrology department: The similarities are striking. Both have been the subject of profile segments on ESPN’s “Scholastic Sports America,” both are considered among the top prospects in their particular sports in Southern California--if not the nation--and both are seniors who compete for Valley schools.

What is more, Mitchell Butler of Oakwood and Russell White, high school All-Americans in basketball and football, respectively, share the same birth date: Dec. 15, 1970.

“That’s real interesting,” Butler said.

There are other parallels.

In live game action taped for the ESPN show, both of their teams lost. Crespi lost its opener to Redlands after White sprained an ankle earlier in the week in practice. Oakwood lost its game against Cate when Butler sprained an ankle three days earlier in practice.