Early woes lead to St. Francis basketball’s downfall in CIF title game against Santa Clarita Christian
AZUSA — The road to a first CIF title for the St. Francis High basketball team ran through the Southern Section Division II-AA top-seed Santa Clarita Christian.
In their first championship game since 2014, the Golden Knights were aware of the tough and lengthy defense ahead of them at Azusa Pacific University on Saturday.
The Cardinals lived up to their to billing and made it tough for the Golden Knights to score in the first half.
St. Francis struggled to score in the first half and ultimately fell to Santa Clarita Christian, 61-39, in the championship game.
“They’re pretty good,” St. Francis coach Todd Wolfson said. “I have to give credit to them. They’re a very good basketball team. It sounds weird, but I don’t think we lost today. I’m a big believer in you either win or you learn, and we learned a lot today.
“We learned a lot about how much better we need to get for state playoffs, we learned how much better we have to be as a team and we learned how other teams are going to try to take our guys away. It’s a good learning experience for us to play a team like that.”
St. Francis (26-8), the third-place team from the Mission League, made just four baskets on 19 shots from the field in the first half and missed all eight field goal attempts in the second quarter.
“We really work to try to make sure we rep all their sets and their plays, and we wanted to combine that and just go hard,” said Santa Clarita Christian coach James Mosley, whose team played in its third straight championship game and won for the second time in that stretch. “We knew we had a lot of long, athletic defenders and we knew they were a great shooting team, so we really focused on just trying to keep them out of the paint.”
The Golden Knights were held to single-digit scoring in the first and second quarters as the Cardinals (24-5) built a 27-13 advantage at halftime.
St. Francis senior Andre Henry, a UC Irvine commit, finished with 21 points and seven rebounds and senior Jason Gallant added 13 points for the Golden Knights.
“It wasn’t difficult at all,” Henry said. “I trust every single teammate to knock down a shot. I’ve seen all of them knock down thousands of shots every single day. Tonight just wasn’t the night.”
The Cardinals, who had four players finish in double digits in scoring, were led by junior Josh O’Garro with 17 points and seven rebounds. Senior Kaleb Lowery added 13 points and grabbed 11 rebounds and senior Ty Harper and junior Tiago Soares each contributed 10 points.
The Golden Knights turned aside neighbor La Cañada, San Gabriel Academy, No. 2 Heritage Christian and Eastvale Roosevelt to reach their first championship game in six years.
After victories against Maranatha, La Habra and Fairmont Prep, the top-seed Cardinals reached the title game with an overtime win in the Division II-AA semifinal against Mission League runner-up Chaminade.
Six points from Henry closed the first quarter with a 12-8 deficit against the Cardinals.
Though the Golden Knights struggled to score from the field, St. Francis did much of its scoring from the free-throw line, making five of six at the charity stripe.
The Cardinals also had trouble scoring in the second quarter and were quiet for nearly six minutes after a O’Garro opened the frame with a three-pointer.
A pair of put-back baskets from Soares and Lowery got the Cardinals out of their scoring slump for a 14-point lead at the half, 27-13.
The Golden Knights finally scored their first field goal since 40.2 in the first after a Gallant three-point play cut the Cardinals lead to 31-18 at 4:58 in the third. However, Santa Clarita Christian answered right back with a three-point play from Lowery to put the lead back up to 16.
Gallant knocked down the Golden Knights’ first three-pointer of the game shortly thereafter to pull within to within 35-21 with 3:11 left in the third. But the Cardinals put together a 6-0 run to take a 20-point advantage with 1:51 remaining in the quarter.
Henry finished off the third with five points in the final minute of play to make it a 43-26 game heading into the final quarter.
Henry, who scored 15 points in the second half, followed up the third-quarter scoring with eight points in the fourth to try to fuel the Golden Knights back into the game, but the Cardinals held off St. Francis for the title.
