No surprises at top of section seedings
But St. Francis seeded behind Menlo, Paly in CCS Open; Logan has Amador, Moreau in NCS path
The committees have spoken, the matchups are set and the games are about to begin.
There were plenty of smiles and high-fives Sunday as teams across the Bay Area held parties to watch streamed selection shows that unveiled the basketball playoff brackets in the North Coast and Central Coast sections.
There were no surprises at the top. Boys teams from Salesian, Bishop O’Dowd and Bellarmine College Prep received No. 1 seeds in their brackets, as did the Archbishop Mitty, Salesian and Miramonte girls.
But not everything went as projected.
In the CCS, the St. Francis boys — the second-best team in arguably the Bay Area’s best top-tobottom league — were seeded behind Menlo and Palo Alto in the Open Division and on the same side of the bracket as top seed Bellarmine.
So anyone anticipating a potential Jake Wojcik (Bellarmine) vs. Logan Johnson (St. Francis) section championship game at Santa Clara University, well, scratch that off the calendar.
It’s not going to happen. The best they can hope for is another semifinal matchup, as was the case last season.
St. Francis plays Sequoia in the opening round Friday at Santa Clara High, the first game of a doubleheader that also includes a third meeting this season between Serra and Bellarmine.
Bellarmine potentially will have to beat Serra and St. Francis for a third time to return to the final.
How difficult will that be? “I would certainly hope that having lost the title game last year is a fresh reminder of the importance of locking in on the third game as fiercely as you did the first two,” said Bellarmine coach Patrick Schneider, whose team lost to Archbishop Mitty in the final a year ago.
In the other Open quarterfinals, Friday at Fremont High in Sunnyvale, Mitty will face No. 2 seed Menlo and No. 3 seed Palo Alto will take on No. 6 seed St. Ignatius.
West Catholic Athletic League teams have lost only one firstround Open game when paired against non-WCAL opponents — Sacred Heart Prep over Archbishop Riordan in 2015 — but the committee Sunday decided that two teams this season deserved a higher seed than the WCAL’s runner-up, St. Francis.
“I think it’s incredibly fair, and I think it’s shown how far Menlo and Palo Alto have come,” Menlo coach Keith Larsen told the Bay Area News Group’s Vytas Mazeika. “I don’t think a couple of years ago we would’ve had that much respect, just because we don’t play maybe in leagues that are looked upon as tough as the WCAL.”
On the other side of the Bay, in the NCS, the James Logan boys were shocked where they ended up. They won the De La Salle tournament in December, tied Moreau Catholic for the Mission Valley Athletic League championship and are the defending Northern California Division I champs.
But Logan received a No. 7 seed in Division I — two spots behind De La Salle — and will travel Tuesday to No. 10 seed Amador Valley, which gets the home game because it won at DLS and Dublin last week to claim the East Bay
Athletic League championship.
Logan does not have a league championship designation, having agreed to give Moreau the crown this season because Moreau did the same for Logan last year when the teams tied for the MVAL title.
Still, Logan coach Melvin Easley didn’t think Amador and Dublin would be in his team’s path just to reach the semifinals, which guarantees a return to NorCals. Dublin is seeded No. 2 and has an opening-round bye.
“I don’t know how that happens when De La losses, and we won their tournament, and Berkeley loses,” Easley said, referring to the No. 4 seed Yellow Jackets. “How did Amador get a 10 seed and they won their league? They beat Dublin.”
Karen Smith, an NCS associate commissioner, pulled out Logan’s application and noted that Logan ranked itself behind De La Salle.
“The committee would see that and say, ‘Well, if it’s between these two schools and their own school ranked themselves below them, how are we going to argue that?’” Smith said.
Told of Smith’s comments, Easley said his original application had De La Salle ahead of Logan.
But after Logan beat Moreau, Easley said, he updated his rankings to the NCS.
All that said, the coach asked why is the NCS committee going by his rankings to determine seeding?
“To say that you’re using the rankings from a specific coach makes no sense to me,” Easley said. “You can rank yourself whatever you want to rank yourself. The record that we have is 20-6, 12-2 in league and a co-championship.”