Taking Their Chances : Brea Olinda Boys Get Opportunity to Reverse Their Playoff Fortunes

This is Ladycat country and no one has felt that more than the boys’ basketball team at Brea Olinda High School. For 15 seasons, the boys have taken a backseat to the girls’ basketball program, which has produced eight consecutive Southern Section titles--nine overall--and five state championships.

The Ladycats have won 15 consecutive Orange League titles and 101 consecutive league games, which is a Southern Section record.

The Wildcats, too, have recently built a successful program, but it has been largely overlooked despite three consecutive league titles, including the last two with 10-0 finishes. Brea (23-3) closed out the regular season with 17 consecutive victories--a school record--and its three-year overall mark is 66-15.

But when it comes to the playoffs, the Brea boys have struggled. To earn a reputation as one of the elite county boys’ teams, players and coaches say the sixth-ranked Wildcats must perform well in the Southern Section Division II-A playoffs, thus proving their 81.5% regular-season winning percentage over the last three seasons is no fluke.

“We can’t come out flat after our league is over like we did in the playoffs last year,” senior forward Jason Skrifvars said.

Brea, which opens the Division II-A playoffs Friday against visiting Palm Desert, is still reeling from its shocking first-round exit in 1996. The Wildcats posted a 24-3 record a year ago, but lost in the first round to unheralded Hacienda Heights Los Altos, 66-59.

How stunning was it? The annual basketball record book published by the school says that falling to Los Altos in the first round was “a bitter taste” of defeat that “still lingers.”

Players agree.

“Yeah, we still think about it,” senior guard Sean Wink said. “We had a couple of seniors that got hurt and a couple of players who weren’t 100%.

“We talk about that loss everyday. It’s good to keep it in mind because it keeps things in perspective. To forget something like that is wrong because it was a learning experience.”

The loss to Los Altos was a major setback to Coach Gene Lloyd and the rebuilding process he began four seasons ago. Lloyd, a silver-haired native of Indiana, ran the Wildcats from 1974 to 1986 before stepping down to teach at Brea Junior High, where he helped develop an athletic feeder system for the high school.

The first time around, Lloyd’s Wildcats were truly kings of the mountain, or in those days anyway, downtown Brea. Girls’ sports were just beginning to compete in the Southern Section and the Ladycats weren’t as well known as they are today. The Wildcats had the run of the old gym at the former campus on Birch Street, which opened in 1926 but has since given way to a shopping mall. The new campus on the hill opened in 1989.

Brea won nine league titles in those early years, and Lloyd posted a 233-93 record. But in the seven years between Lloyd’s stints, Brea’s record, while still respectable, was a ho-hum 104-84. The Wildcats tied for three league titles but had losing seasons from 1990 to 1993.

When Lloyd returned, he knew things were going to be different. For one thing, every time the girls’ team won another title, the school hoisted a banner high above the floor of the gym--the same floor his team practiced on every day during the season.

Lloyd felt he had to start from scratch with his philosophies of strong man-to-man defense and an offensive attack of back screens, pick and rolls and strong rebounding.

The Wildcats went 6-20 in his first season back in 1993-94, but mustered a 19-9 mark in 1994-95 and advanced to the second round of the playoffs. Lloyd has an overall mark of 307-128 at Brea and, including a 10-year stint at Terre Haute (Ind.) State High, where he began his career in 1963, has a career mark of 429-229.

The turnaround posted by the Wildcats over the last three seasons has supporters excited that more good things may be on the way.

“I think the general belief that the boys don’t get as much respect as the girls do is less now than it was,” Wildcat booster club president Jim Giesler said. “Five years ago, however, that certainly was true.”

Lloyd says it’s high time the Wildcats receive some attention.

“At this point I don’t think we’re being overlooked,” he said. “I think we are underrated. We’re ranked sixth and I’m not sure why we are sixth. We ought to be fourth.”

He stops short of saying this is the best team he has ever coached, but he isn’t short with praise for his players.

“We have real great balance,” Lloyd said. “Chris McMillian, our point guard, is our speed guy with the ball. Wink is the shooter, and the most tenacious rebounder I have ever seen is Skrifvars. Throw in the rest of the kids who can play and we have balance and role playing, which has been big.”

There are several reasons why Brea might not get the respect Lloyd thinks it deserves.

Tucked away in the northern section of the county, the city’s distance from the rest of Orange County is a a factor. A bus ride over the hill to nearby Diamond Bar High in Los Angeles County, for example, is closer than a trip to Orange League-rival Western in Anaheim.

The city school system is small. A half-dozen elementary schools feed one junior high that eventually sends all of its 5,000 students up the hill to the state-of-the-art high school campus, which has a picturesque view of Northern Orange County on land that once supported oil wells.

“That’s a gold mine up there,” Sonora Coach Mike Murphy said. “The way the elementary schools feed into the high school really is a plus for the program.”

Villa Park Coach Kevin Reynolds, like Lloyd is at a foothill school in the northern portion of the county.

“We learned that you won’t get recognized unless you come down and play the Mater Deis and other top schools,” he said.

And then there is the Orange League, which, well, isn’t considered the strongest of leagues. The combined overall record of Brea’s five league opponents this year was 55-69.

“A lot of the basketball activity is centered down the hill in central and southern Orange County away from Brea,” Giesler, a youth coach in the city, said. “But [any lack of respect] stems from the Orange League. It is not a real basketball power.” The Ladycats, on the other hand, have played several high-profile games on the road this season, including major tournaments in Santa Barbara and Ohio. The Brea boys seem to be more comfortable playing at home. This season, for example, the Wildcats played in three tournaments, two of which it hosted and the other in Glendora.

With a trend toward big showcase games and tournaments, some county basketball fans would like to see Brea come down from the hill a little more often. Mater Dei Coach Gary McKnight has invited the Wildcats to play in next year’s Nike Invitational, a one-day tournament at the Bren Center that features some the nation’s top teams.

“I’d love to see Brea in showcase events,” said Reynolds of Villa Park. “I’ve always heard that they think they don’t get enough respect up there. But they don’t market themselves too well. We found out the hard way, that the only way to get that respect is to come down off the hill and play the top teams. It’s a reality today.”

Lloyd defends his team’s success, however, pointing to a 75-49 nonleague victory over fourth-ranked Villa Park at home. But in their other games against top 10 teams, the Wildcats lost on the road to third-ranked Sonora, 71-51, and at home to eighth-ranked Calvary Chapel, 71-61.

Nevertheless, the Wildcats are proud of their success this season.

“Sure we are getting more respect,” said Wink, who set a single-season school record with 76 three-pointers. “The last two years both the girls’ and boys’ teams have had about the same records. Fans are coming out to our games more than to the girls’ games. It’s fun to sit with the girls at lunch and compare newspaper stats.”

Wink, who averages 20.3 points, is part of a cast of players who went to elementary school and played youth ball together. Both the boys’ and girls’ teams have established feeder programs in the Brea Olinda Unified School District’s six elementary schools and one junior high. The elementary schools and junior high all teach the Brea philosophy of basketball. “The feeder program gives us the ability to identify kids early and get them involved and to motivate them to be in our basketball program,” Lloyd said.

McMillian says the feeder program has made a world of difference and, although he and others admit that the boys system has taken longer to develop than the girls system has, he believes that in a few years the Wildcats will be just as successful as the Ladycats.

“Lots of guys have grown up together,” McMillian, a junior, said. “We can read each other pretty well. The feeder program was great. Now that we are here, it’s just a matter of going out and getting the job done.”