Basketball: Alumni association

Scott Cameron plans to be at the Corona del Mar High gymnasium Saturday to watch his son Chase play in the Jack Errion Memorial Back Bay Alumni Basketball Tournament.

Chase, who played at Newport Harbor before graduating in 2003, has served as Newport Harbor alumni basketball tournament director the past two years. On the court, his team has won that tournament three times in the past five years.

This year, though, the two Back Bay schools are combining their alumni tournaments for the first time. Unlike last year, playing at CdM and against CdM players might be something different for Chase Cameron and his ex-Sailor teammates, including former UCLA basketball and volleyball player Jamie Diefenbach and Nedim Pajevic, who played hoops at Weber State and UC Santa Barbara.

Diefenbach is 6-foot-8. Pajevic is 6-9. It remains to be seen if they will stand tall in the combined alumni tournament.

Scott Cameron (CdM class of 1972), who also played at Orange Coast College and the University of Redlands, can’t resist getting in a few digs.

“It has been a problem,” Scott Cameron said. “Every time I show up, [Chase] loses, so it’s like too much pressure for him.”

Chase just grinned.

“You have to have someone to score-keep,” he snapped back.

Scott, now 62, indeed won’t be playing this year. He stopped playing in the CdM tournament sometime in his 40s, he said. Yet, he will show up Saturday. He wants to see what the team of Kevin Hanson, who played volleyball in the 2008 Summer Olympics, can do. Scott Cameron coached Hanson on the CdM junior varsity basketball team in the late 1990s, when Cameron was helping out then-head coach Paul Orris.

There’s a lot of history and pride on both sides of the bay, for sure. There was talk through the years of combining the alumni tournaments, or maybe even having the tournament winners play each other the following day. But they never quite materialized until recently.

Newport Harbor alumni tournament founder Jamie Holmes was college roommates with Scott Cameron at Redlands. Two years ago, Holmes handed the reins to the Sailors alumni tournament to Chase.

Chase Cameron is good friends with Brett Matsen (CdM class of 2003), who has run the Sea Kings’ tournament with Geoff Hunt since 2014. The three got to talking.

The timing of the merger is good on the Newport Harbor side, Chase Cameron said, as he doesn’t have access to the Sailors’ gym this summer because it’s under renovation.

“We’d really like to see how we can make this a bigger community tournament, and where we can go with this,” Cameron said. “This first year will be great, to get everybody on board with the idea and used to playing with each other. Then we’ll start to work out the details of how we can really make this thing grow again.”

Hunt said there are at least five teams registered on each side, though day-of registration will also be available beginning at 8 a.m. Saturday. The entry fee is $200 per team.

Pool play is planned for the morning, with CdM and Newport Harbor teams intermixed, followed by a single-elimination knockout round. The championship game should be sometime between 1 and 2 p.m., Hunt said.

Mike Hess, who in 1989 founded the CdM tournament formerly known as the Jack Errion Memorial Corona del Mar High basketball alumni tournament, said he can’t make it out this year. But Hess, who lives aborad, believes the format should be interesting.

“It’ll definitely add a little more intensity to it,” Hess said. “You might be a little less familiar with who [your opponents] are exactly, but you know where they played. Maybe a little bit of school pride comes into it there.”

Hunt said the Cass of 2015, defending tournament champion for the Sea Kings’ tournament, will aim to defend its title in the expanded tournament.

Of course, Chase Cameron plans to do the same.

“Everybody that I’ve talked to on our side has been really fired up about it, and looking forward to getting back into this rivalry a little bit,” he said. “It’ll be competitive, definitely, and that’s what we want. We’ll see which school is going to claim it. I don’t want to brag, but I think it’s going to be us.

“We’re not coming in here to just play. We’re coming in here to win and take back this [CdM] gym.”

Now it was Scott Cameron’s turn to just smile and shake his head at his son.

“That just shouldn’t happen,” he said.