Taking Two Roads to Playoffs

The best winning percentage of any boys’ basketball team in Orange County, you ask?

Certainly that belongs to perennial power Mater Dei, right? After all, the Monarchs are 26-3 (.897).

Nope.

Well, how about Santa Margarita (.923) or Brea Olinda (.923)?

Wrong again.

The honor belongs to Pacifica (.962), which takes a 25-1 record into Wednesday’s Southern Section Division II-A playoff opener at home against La Verne Bonita. The Mariners have won more games than any other team in school history and have a 23-game winning streak.

Senior forward Jayson Simpson is the first to admit what Pacifica has accomplished this season has been astonishing. “It’s been a dream,” he said. “We hope it ends like a dream. Actually, we don’t want it to end as we’re having too much fun.”

But few thought Pacifica would do this well. The Mariners don’t have a starter taller than 6-1. That might not matter in the Garden Grove League, but it doesn’t match up well with Los Alamitos’ 6-8 center Jeff Grgas.

Still, Pacifica defeated the Sunset League champions, 73-60.

“They’re a very outstanding team,” Griffin Coach Steve Brooks said. “They are very well coached and they play very well together. They’re very unselfish. They’d have done well in a lot of other leagues this year.”

Simpson, who was a second-team all-county wide receiver for Pacifica’s football team last fall, sat in the Mariners’ locker room late last week with guard Adam Rachlin and just shook his head as he ticked off his team’s victories and how they had been accomplished.

“We enjoy what we are doing,” Simpson said, “and we go out to play each game to have a lot of fun.”

Winning couldn’t be more fun. Simpson and four teammates have not lost a league game in their high school careers, a string of 48 consecutive victories that includes 1995-96 freshmen and 1996-97 junior varsity championships. Over the past two seasons, the varsity is 14-0.

“That’s a rare thing in the public school system for kids to go through their entire four years and not lose a game,” Pacifica Coach Bob Becker said.

Becker led a similarly scrappy team to a Southern Section title in 1993, but this season could provide his crowning jewel.

Four years ago, the incoming class of freshmen players hit it off pretty well, Rachlin and Simpson said. Simpson arrived at Pacifica from a parochial middle school in Los Alamitos. He wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but he quickly made friends.

“To me, we just seemed like one giant family,” Simpson said.

Last season, the Mariners finished 24-5 and reached the quarterfinals of the Division II-A playoffs. Their 84-63 loss to Redondo Beach Redondo Union ended an 18-game winning streak.

This season, their only loss has been to Redondo Union, 92-71. Pacifica suffered a shaky first quarter and couldn’t catch up. The Mariners resolved there would be no more of that.

“We played them even the last three quarters,” Rachlin said.

Pacifica went on to win titles at the Los Alamitos and Las Vegas tournaments.

Rachlin said he’s not surprised by this season’s success as he and his teammates relished the opportunity to play against good competition.

“It’s not like we haven’t seen top players and teams before,” he said. “We’ve had four summers to prepare for this, playing against good teams on all levels.

“We went to Canada a couple of years ago and played against its national team. We played against some of the top teams from the state of Washington. We went to Hawaii and played some of its best teams. Just because we have a league with a schedule that, notoriety-wise, isn’t recognized across the county, we’ve still played a high caliber of teams elsewhere.”

Becker says his team “has proven that we can play with good, solid teams.”

Asked if winning the Garden Grove League title means as much as winning a title in another league, Becker bristles.

“The top four teams in our league have won at least 15 games,” he said. “That’s a good year for any high school team. Our league is not as bad as some people say it is. I think teams in our league will win some games in the playoffs.”

Simpson agreed. “Our league was a tuneup for postseason,” he said. “[It] just showed that we are for real.”

Los Alamitos’ Brooks said what he noticed most about the Mariners was how well each player understood his role.

Rachlin leads the team in scoring (15.7 points), and Simpson leads in rebounding (8.3). Guard Danny Dinh has made 46.9% of his three-point attempts, while Girard is right behind at 39%.

The Mariners are pretty good from the free-throw line, too. Waldecker, Dinh and Rachlin are shooting 81% or better.

“We know what we want to do and we try to execute our game plan the best we can,” Rachlin said. “The best thing about this team is our team unity. Not one person gets all the rebounds. Not one person shoots all the time.”

Said Simpson: “We’re a pretty athletic team. We don’t have great height or size, but we are smart.”

Becker said he doesn’t expect anyone to overlook the Mariners in the playoffs.

“They’ll take one look at our record and we’re not going to surprise anybody,” he said. “The teams that surprise you are 14-12.

“Early on, we had an edge when we had no big record to look at, or we surprised some people who looked at us [as inferior] physically. That was to our advantage. But now we’ll have to play our butts off, hope for some breaks and hope that we are peaking at the right time.”