Choosing No. 1 Basketball Team No Job for Faint of Heart : Basketball: Virtual parity has made choosing the best high school teams a difficult task.

OK, OK.

We had a little trouble picking a weekly Top 10 this season. A few of our No. 1 teams made quicker exits than a bad comedian at a slingshot convention.

But let’s face it, besting a Vegas slot machine might have been easier than selecting a winning team in, say, the Palomar League, which looked like this after the first 10 games:

First place: Poway (7-3).

Second place: Torrey Pines (6-4).

Second place: Fallbrook (6-4).

Second place: Rancho Buena Vista (6-4).

Second place: Mt. Carmel (6-4).

Second place: San Dieguito (6-4).

One league. Five runners-up. So cut us a little slack. It was a crazy season, chock full of parity and upsets.

Poway wound up sharing the Palomar League title with Torrey Pines. Poway is now ranked No. 3 in our Times Top 10 and is the top seed for the Division I playoffs. Three other Palomar teams--Rancho Buena Vista, Mt. Carmel and Torrey Pines--were or still are in our Top 10. RBV and Mt. Carmel both reached No. 1.

We probably should have hired Poway Coach Doug Wealch as a consultant. He knew what was going on before the season even got rolling, saying: “Three or four losses will win (the Palomar League title). I would be very surprised if any team has two losses. If they want to give us two losses (for the season) right now, we’d take it.”

Poway and Torrey Pines won with four losses.

“Our league has been so tough,” Mt. Carmel Coach John Marincovich said. “I don’t remember it ever being this even. Ever. Not having six teams contesting for the championship. . . . With a little bit of luck, we could be in first place right now. In fact, any team in our league could say that.”

And the Palomar League wasn’t unique. None of the county’s 11 leagues had been clinched going into the final week of the regular season.

“That’s pretty amazing right there,” said Ray Johnson, coach of top-ranked El Camino. “Usually you have a pretty clear-cut favorite and everybody else is chasing them.”

Now that the regular season is settled, the new season begins with this week’s playoffs, which figure to be as unpredictable as the regular season. Why should things be any different?

“You can roll the dice on just about everyone,” Johnson said. “I don’t think there’s any sure winner in either Division I or II.”

Or, for that matter, III or V.

If you want to bet, take Lincoln and the points in Division IV. The Hornets are three-time defending champions.

Other than that, hold your cash.

To be sure, this has been a strange season. How about Ramona earning a share in the Avocado League title with El Camino? Ramona? It hadn’t won a league championship since 1974, when it was part of the Mountain Empire League. The Bulldogs joined the Avocado League in 1976, and it took them 16 seasons to reach the top, which they celebrated with an avocado smashing session after Friday night’s clincher over Rancho Bernardo.

Rancho Buena Vista arrived at No. 1 at the beginning of the season with less effort, by way of our good old preseason Top 10. And the Longhorns should have been good, really good. Really. This team returned two talented players in Darryl Parker and Brad Grubaugh and four starters from a 15-10 finish in 1990.

So we ranked them No. 1. And that made RBV Coach John O’Neill nervous.

“Well, I think we were ranked higher than we should have been,” O’Neill said. “It was nice . . . but in reality, it wasn’t true.”

The Longhorns started slowly, largely because their first three games were against teams that were ranked in the top 10 in the state: fifth-ranked Mater Dei, seventh-ranked Long Beach Jordan and eighth-ranked Marina.

A nagging ankle injury to Bond Schoeffel, a 6-4 forward, didn’t help. When RBV finally got moving, things still weren’t quite right. The team was inconsistent, and that still perplexes O’Neill. The Longhorns had won four in a row entering this week, and then they lost to Fallbrook and Mt. Carmel.

“I think there’s maybe a little bit of panic right now because they thought that things would be a lot better at this point,” O’Neill said. “It’s very puzzling to me trying to figure out what the reason is.”

Still, coaches are keeping an eye on Rancho Buena Vista, figuring talent and experience can’t stay in a slumber forever.

“They’re capable of winning the whole thing,” Torrey Pines Coach John Farrell said, “If their kids get hot, you can’t stop them.”

Maybe we weren’t completely off base about RBV after all . . .

Anyway, Rancho dropped to fifth in our second poll, seventh in our third poll and has been unranked from the fourth on. We weren’t exactly clairvoyant with our No. 1 picks in the second and third polls either.

Morse deposed RBV in Poll II and then slipped to unranked by Poll VII. Morse is another team with a lot of talent that hasn’t been capable of stringing victories together on a regular basis.

Inexperience has slowed the Tigers, who have only two senior starters. Also, Coach Ron Davis has yet to locate a true floor leader. The seniors, he said, haven’t taken charge.

“We’ve lacked a lot of leadership,” Davis said. “That’s been the real key to our inconsistency.”

By Poll III, Mt. Carmel had moved into the No. 1 slot. The Sundevils stuck around through Poll IV but were then bumped to No. 2 and then to No. 10. A 13-point loss to Torrey Pines Jan. 16 helped pushed them to the tail end of our poll. Performances since, Marincovich said, have often been flat, though his team was back to form last week and should be difficult to eliminate in the playoffs.

San Diego visited No. 1 briefly on Jan. 22 before El Camino moved in for the remainder of the season. Talent isn’t as abundant at San Diego as it was last season when Clark James was around, but, nonetheless, Coach Dennis Kane likes his team as much as any in the past because it plays well together.

Now, No. 1 belongs to El Camino, the top team in our final three polls. Led by Jeff Reeves, who averaged nearly 21 points a game, the Wildcats won eight of their final nine games. Their only loss was to Ramona by two points.

We ranked El Camino second in our initial poll and the Wildcats never dipped lower than sixth. With the exception of Poway, which started at No. 4, dropped no lower than fifth and is now ranked second, El Camino has been the most consistent team in the county.

So they are No. 1 entering the playoffs and, of course, since Coach O’Neill didn’t agree with our pick at the beginning of the season it is only fair to give Ray Johnson a chance to critique our final pick.

You’re on, coach. Are we on target?

“Well,” Johnson said, “by reason that we’ve been more consistent than anybody else, probably yes. . . . Our players have a lot of confidence in themselves. That’s helped us.”

Good enough.

On to the playoffs.

UP AND DOWN SEASONS

The Times’ rankings of county boys’ basketball teams for each poll during the 1990-91 season, beginning with the preseason rating and ending with the Feb. 12 rank. NR-Not ranked.

Team (Record) Pre J1 J8 J15 J22 J29 F5 F12 F19 RBV (12-13) 1 5 7 NR NR NR NR NR NR El Camino (19-4) 2 6 3 4 3 1 1 1 1 Morse (16-7) 3 1 4 6 9 8 NR NR NR Poway (16-6) 4 3 5 5 5 2 2 2 3 Lincoln (17-9) 5 NR NR NR 8 5 5 4 5 University City (12-9) 6 9 NR NR NR NR NR NR NR Chula Vista (14-12) 7 NR NR NR NR NR NR NR NR Kearny (21-5) 8 4 2 2 4 3 3 3 2 San Diego (4-17) 9 8 6 3 1 7 7 9 8 Mt. Carmel (18-7) 10 2 1 1 2 10 9 NR NR Sweetwater (21-5) NR 7 9 7 10 4 4 6 6 USDHS (19-4) NR 10 8 9 6 9 8 NR 10 Mt. Miguel (15-9) NR NR 10 8 NR NR NR NR NR Torrey Pines (20-7) NR NR NR 10 7 NR NR 5 4 Serra (15-6) NR NR NR NR NR 6 6 7 NR Ramona (17-5) NR NR NR NR NR NR 10 8 7 Helix (18-5) NR NR NR NR NR NR NR 10 9