Oak Park boys’ basketball enjoying the ride

By Kyle Jorrey jorrey@theacorn.com

After years of watching their football counterparts enjoy all the postseason accolades, the Oak Park boys’ basketball team is now the biggest attraction on the OPHS campus thanks to its first-ever berth in a Southern Section championship game.

The encouraging pats on the back and the "atta-boys" once reserved for the Eagle football squad have found their way to the hoopsters, who this Saturday will be the only basketball team from the Conejo Valley to compete for a title at the Pond in Anaheim. The team will take the floor at 9 a.m. against three-time Southern Section defending champs Harvard-Westlake, which advanced with a dominant 81-46 win over Estancia.

Senior guard Zach Greenwald might have put it best.

"I’ve always been jealous of the football players come CIF time, but now we have all those fans behind us," Greenwald said. "It’s great. Our crowd is like our sixth man wherever we go."

Oak Park advanced to the finals in storybook fashion, upending three higher-seeded teams along the way—the last two on the last-second heroics of senior forward Blake Wildt.

Reminiscent of Utah’s Keith Van Horn in the 1996 NCAA Tournament, Wildt hit two game-winning jumpers with less than four seconds remaining on the clock in two consecutive games. First, to lift the Eagles over El Segundo, 55-53, then over top-seeded Compton Centennial, 53-52, in a semifinal game played at Lynwood High School.

"It’s almost been like a dream you don’t want to wake up from," said Wildt, who is averaging 13 points per game in the playoffs. "The first night after we won against Compton, it didn’t really hit most of us until the next morning. A bunch of us got up and called each other and were like, ‘Hey, we just won. We’re going to state and we’re going to play for a CIF championship."

Awaiting the energized Eagles (19-9) in the playoffs will be the Wolverines of Harvard-Westlake (24-3), winners of 16 out of 17 and the No. 2 seeded team in Div. III-A. No strangers to the championship setting, Harvard-Westlake is led by 6-foot-9 junior Alex Stephenson, who averaged 17 points, 13.9 rebounds and 3.8 blocks per game this season. In the quarterfinals against Muir he put up 21 points, 17 rebounds and 12 blocked shots.

"This is the single biggest guy we’ve gone against this season," head coach Ed Chevalier said. "He’s a guy you guard by committee. Heck, we’d like to guard him with a committee of 15 if we could. Seventeen if you bring out the coaches."

Expect forwards Gavin Ketchum and Nick Noyer, two guys who never shy away from physical contact, to try and keep the ball out of Stephenson’s hands throughout. Wildt said the team’s philosophy is simple—less touches means less baskets.

"When we’re defending good big men we really emphasize getting in position in front rather than behind, keeping it out of their hands as much as possible," Wildt said. "After a while of not getting the ball they start to get frustrated and that takes them out of their game."

Offensively, Oak Park is blessed with both balance and confidence as five Eagle players average more than five points per game. No one is afraid to take an open jumper, said Greenwald, because each player has earned the other’s trust.

"Our depth has been a real quality of this team," Greenwald said. "Everyone knows what the other can do so no one ever gets mad for somebody taking a shot."

Senior point guard Ryan Buckley runs an offense that can score inside and out; out of a set play or on the go.

But their greatest asset maybe their patience—the Eagles rarely take a bad shot.

Against a big and physical team like H.W., which features four players over 6-foot-5, Oak Park will need to shoot accurately from the outside—watch for shooters Jason Fahn and Brian Lantos to convert.

Though H.W. comes in with a serious advantage in title game experience, players believe the Wolverines familiarity with the big day might actually work in Oak Park’s favor.

"For them, it’s been there done that, and when you’re like that sometimes you come in just expecting to win," Wildt said. "For us, we’ve never been there and we might never be there again. We have everything to win and nothing to lose. We’re really going to come out hard. . . . For them, it’s another walk in the park. We have a lot more desire."

Chevalier, who will coach in his first championship game in 25 years of coaching, agreed.

"They have the name players, the titles and all that stuff they bring with them into the game," Chevalier said. "But maybe we’ll bring that extra bit of determination because we don’t have all those banners. We’d like to have this one."

Regardless of what goes down Saturday morning, it will be hard for the Eagles to look at this season as anything but a success. Sure they missed out on a league title and had shaky start, but this title run has erased those memories clear away.

"This has probably been the best single week in our school’s boys basketball history," Chevalier said. "It’s fabulous. We get to represent our school in a CIF championship game. This is what we’ve been after."

As Greenwald explained, this is a special project years in the making.

"It’s amazing, we’ve been thinking about this since we were little kids, (senior guard) Jeremy Davis and I," Greenwald said. "We always looked forward to being seniors . . . I remember in eight grade watching that team that went to the semis. We thought back then that we’d get an opportunity to get our ring, and now we have it. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and all of us want to make the most of it."