CdM on the road again
For the second consecutive Saturday, the Corona del Mar High girls’ basketball team has a road trip.
Last weekend it was a trek several hours north to Paso Robles High in the second round of the CIF Southern Section Division 3A playoffs. Compared to that, a 56-mile drive to La Cañada High this weekend doesn’t seem so bad.
“The first thing everybody said is, ‘How far is La Cañada?’” CdM Coach Mark Decker said. “When we told them it’s an hour to an hour and a half, they laughed. That’s easy.”
The trip may not be as long, but the stakes are much higher. The No. 3-seeded Sea Kings (23-6) will play at the No. 2-seeded Spartans (25-3) in a Division 3A semifinal game Saturday night.
It’s CdM’s third straight trip to the CIF semifinals. The last two also involved road trips and ended in losses, at No. 2-seeded Lake Elsinore Lakeside in 2014 and at top-seeded eventual champion North Torrance last year.
A win Saturday would send the Sea Kings to their second CIF championship game in program history. The only other time the program made it was 1982-83, when it captured the Division 3A title after beating Esperanza at the Long Beach Arena. That’s long enough ago now that Decker was a teenager back then like his current players.
CdM has gradually moved up in the seedings, from No. 6 two years ago to No. 5 last year to No. 3 this year. To break through, Decker’s team needs a big road victory.
“We can’t control the coin flips at the CIF office,” Decker said. “Three years in a row we’ve lost those. But I think with the senior group we have, we know that really doesn’t matter. We’ve got to come out and play our game. There’s no excuses. We either get it done or we don’t. I think we have that mentality, that will help us.”
UC Santa Barbara-bound senior forward Natalia Bruening, the two-time reigning Newport-Mesa Player of the Year, leads CdM. Bruening is averaging 18 points per game this season, and has bumped that up to 21 per game in the playoffs. She makes a formidable one-two punch down low with CdM senior center Krista Anderson.
Bruening is 6-foot-4 and Anderson is 6-2. La Cañada, the Rio Hondo League champion, offers comparable size that the Sea Kings haven’t seen a lot this year. The Spartans’ strength is also in their post players, as junior center Zoe Williams (11.7 points per game) and senior center Amber Graves (11.6) lead La Cañada in scoring. Both Williams and Graves are 6-1.
Senior guard Sarah Kurdoghlian (8.9 points per game) and junior guard Alexi Nazarian (7.7) are other leaders for La Cañada, which is led by first-year Coach Sarah Beattie. La Cañada topped Leuzinger, 55-40, in the quarterfinals.
The Sea Kings will likely need good games from senior forward Kat Hess and senior point guard Kelly Tam to provide some balance themselves. Hess, who’s also CdM’s girls’ soccer goalie, can focus fully on basketball now after the CdM girls’ soccer team lost at Palos Verdes, 1-0, on Thursday in the Division 2 quarterfinals.
“They’re more balanced, but I think Natalia is the single-best weapon out there,” Decker said. “If the other girls feed off her, I think they’ll be really successful too. She’s going to get hers no matter what, but when the other girls step up, we’re really hard to stop.”
CdM finished second in the Pacific Coast League this season, after sharing the title with Woodbridge last year. But Decker said he likes what the Sea Kings have been doing in their CIF run, especially defensively. They held Ocean View to 10 points in each of the first three quarters of Wednesday’s 56-50 quarterfinal win, before the Seahawks exploded for 20 in the fourth quarter.
It appears likely that CdM will make the CIF State Southern California Regional Division III playoffs, regardless of Saturday’s result. But for the senior class, of which Bruening, Anderson and Tam are four-year varsity players, this last chance to advance to a CIF Southern Section title game isn’t one they will take lightly.
“It’s definitely different,” Decker said of this year’s postseason run. “I think especially toward the end here, the seniors feel the end is closer. I think that’s led to a better focus and more desperation. We’re going to need that Saturday, for sure. If we’re going to break through, we’re going to have to play desperate, extremely focused and hungry.”
No. 4-seeded Santa Maria Righetti (22-4) plays host to top-seeded Lancaster Antelope Valley (24-2) in the other semifinal.
