Valencia looks to cap history with state title
For some teams, a devastating loss can turn a season into a downward spiral.
For the Valencia boys basketball team, a 13-point loss to Foothill League rival West Ranch turned the season around in the best way possible.
Since that Jan. 20 defeat, the Vikings have gone 13-0, including a 5-0 run in the CIF Southern Section Division 4AA playoffs, in which their average margin of victory was 17.4 points.
The Vikings have carried that momentum into the CIF State Division IV playoffs, cruising their way through the Southern California bracket to a state championship date with Half Moon Bay at the Golden 1 Center in Sacramento at noon on Saturday. The game will be televised live by
Spectrum Sports.
“I think for these guys, they’ve been so easy to work with in the playoffs because I think they understand the level of how rare this is, how important it is, the historical relevance,” Valencia head coach Bill Bedgood said. “And we’re not afraid to talk about these things. I know some coaches say it’s just another game. We don’t approach it that way. Throughout this entire run, this mentality started with our second West Ranch loss. ‘We can’t lose another game.’ So they’ve been in this playoff mentality where it’s ‘win or go home’ every single game since then.”
Like his players, Bedgood certainly knows the stakes well.
The veteran coach has experienced similar success in a career that’s spanned 24 years, but he hadn’t won a CIF-SS championship before this season. He had also never reached a state final.
Bedgood started coaching as a varsity assistant at Antelope Valley Christian, before taking over the reins at Bishop Alemany for three years.
His next stop was at Notre Dame, where he coached for 11 years and reached the CIF-SS semifinals once.
He took two years off before his next head coaching job so he could concentrate on helping his son Bryce develop as a player.
“I coached my whole career, Mission League, Alemany, Notre Dame, and then Bryce was maybe 7 or 8 years old and I was watching him play at the local park and rec league and he was really bad. He might have been the worst player on the team,” Bedgood said with a laugh. “I remember standing there watching him with my wife in all my Notre Dame coaching gear, and she goes, ‘For such a big-time coach your kid’s not any good.’ I took a couple years off and started training him and working with him. I felt like a fish out of water coaching 9 and 10 year old kids.”
While Bedgood felt out of place coaching young kids instead of high school student-athletes, admittedly he didn’t want to coach his son in high school.
“I never really wanted to coach him in high school,” he said. “My thought was I just want to get him ready and have him play for somebody else, just because I know the stress and the pressure of having to be both roles. It’s been a challenge. Right now it looks great because we’re having success, but last year when we’re 5-20 and we’re coming home and we’re both sad and my wife is (angry), it was a real challenge to get to this point. But the reward has been so incredibly great.”