DIVISION III BOYS : USDHS, Only 9-17, Wins Title

The mere six points USDHS mustered in the first quarter of Thursday’s San Diego Section Division III championship game against Western League rival La Jolla turned out to be a metaphor for the Dons’ season.

They started the game with only six points, exactly as they started the season with only two victories in 16 games, but they ended the game and the season as Section champions with a 48-40 victory.

“This team worked extremely hard under adverse conditions all year,” said Jim Tomey, USDHS’ third-year coach. “And these kids never gave up.”

They had every reason to with a 2-14 record.

“There were some moments when I looked into their eyes and wondered if they had given up,” Tomey acknowledged. But he never found the wrong answer. “Some kids were just having some difficulty adjusting to varsity basketball for the first time.”

That adjustment was made all the more difficult by Tomey, who decided the best way to prepare for the playoffs in a section that gives every team a slot in the postseason brackets, was to turn the regular season into an endurance test.

Offered as reasons for those 14 defeats were Santa Clara, Santa Ana Mater Dei, Concord De La Salle and Sherman Oaks Notre Dame, all ranked among the state’s best. There was more. USDHS entered the Above the Rim tournament, which brought several of the nation’s top high school teams to San Diego.

Then there were games against some of San Diego’s powerhouses, such as Lincoln and El Camino.

And finally there was an unwitting La Jolla team, which during Western League play, defeated the Dons at home, then lost to them at USDHS. It must have felt like home to the Vikings when they took a seven-point, first-quarter lead.

“Those first five minutes we didn’t even hit the iron,” Tomey said. “But they stuck with it. They never gave up.”

USDHS pecked away during the second quarter, and at one point even took a short-lived one-point lead. But the Dons went into halftime trailing by three.

Which only gave Tomey an opportunity to to issue a rallying cry.

“He told us we worked too hard for this and it was coming down to a matter of who wanted it more,” said senior forward Ian Hamilton. “To win, we would have to give absolutely everything we had.”

The lead changed five times in the third, but after Hamilton hit a three-pointer with 1:05 remaining in that quarter to break a 29-29 tie, USDHS never again trailed.

Hamilton, who scored only two points in the first half, finished with 14.

La Jolla, which went down by five early in the final quarter, wasn’t about to quit, either, and hit five of six free throws to tie it at 35 with 3:28 remaining.

Not bad, but USDHS was even better. The Dons in the final quarter converted 12 of 15 free throws (Brian Barajas was six for six).

In fact, they scored their final nine points from the line to cap what Hamilton said started as “a terrible, terrible season.”

A season that still perplexes the coach.

“We won 20 games last year,” Tomey recalled. “And we didn’t even get this far.”

Thursday’s victory was only USDHS’ ninth against 17 losses. La Jolla finished at 11-14.