Campbell Hall Loses Its Way, Then Loses Its Game, 63-59

With Campbell Hall High making its first appearance in the Southern California regional high school basketball championships, the school’s administrators were careful to go the extra yard in making logistic preparations.

The team bus left Los Angeles at 1 p.m., leaving plenty of time for the 3 1/2-hour drive to Immanuel High, located a few miles south of Fresno.

The team left the hotel in time, but in the darkness, one orchard soon started to look like another.

Campbell Hall arrived 15 minutes before the scheduled tip-off and never recovered, falling, 63-59, in a boys’ Division V game Tuesday night.

Needless to say, Fresno County does not occupy much space in the average Thomas Guide.

The bus driver was so disoriented that the team bus was stopped in the middle of a quiet rural road, and a tow-truck driver was pulled over and queried for directions. The Vikings (24-5) should have asked for a jump-start, because they stumbled from the jump ball until the start of the fourth quarter.

“You can’t expect to walk into a playoff game 15 minutes before it starts and make the right adjustments,” Campbell Hall Coach Joe Jackson said. “The shooting didn’t start to come around until the second half.”

Although a late run made the outcome closer than it actually was, Campbell Hall was reeling by halftime, at which point it trailed, 27-16. It was so bad that when Jackson heard a public-address announcement at intermission that the game would be broadcast locally on a tape-delay basis, he quipped, “Not in L.A., I hope.”

By the end of the third quarter, Immanuel, the Central Section Division V champion, held a 44-28 lead. Campbell Hall made just 10 of 45 shots in the first three quarters (22.2%).

A mad scramble over the final eight minutes made the score respectable. The Vikings scored more points (31) in the fourth quarter than they had in the first three.

Trailing, 57-45, with 2 minutes 36 seconds left, Campbell Hall went on a 9-2 run that cut the lead to 59-54 with 1:08 remaining.

Immanuel (22-5) then turned the ball over, but forward Taylor Williams (two points) missed a jump shot from 12 feet and C. J. Thompkins (11 points) misfired from three-point range with 48 seconds left. Campbell Hall center Alex Lopez, who finished with team highs of 14 points, 11 rebounds and four blocks, then fouled Immanuel’s Bill Lovering to halt a fast break.

The foul was ruled to be intentional and Lovering cashed in both free throws to give the Eagles a 61-54 lead.

On the automatic possession that followed, Jeremy Prys made two free throws to give Immanuel a nine-point lead with 42 seconds left.

“I think if we’d have had another quarter, we might have had a shot,” Jackson said. “We made a lot of mistakes against a good team--a state playoff team--and that’s not gonna work.”

Something that worked, without question, was the box-and-one defense the Eagles used to slow Campbell Hall point guard Austin McKellar, who finished with 11 points, six under his average.

“When I saw he had 30 points against Brentwood, I knew he must be the guy to stop,” Immanuel Coach John Thiesen said of McKellar and his performance in the Southern Section 5-AA final last week. “I think they finally figured it out in the fourth quarter.”

For three quarters, the Viking team statistics were easy to figure too. Campbell Hall’s guard tandem of Thompkins and McKellar combined to score just six points entering the fourth quarter.

McKellar, a junior point guard, made a frigid four of 15 shots from the field.

The Campbell Hall rally in the second half was short-circuited by senior guard Jason Laney, who finished with a game-high 26 points, including 13 of his team’s 17 points in the third quarter.