Mission San Jose survives Oroville rally, advances to NorCal D5 semifinals
FREMONT — This was uncharted territory for Mission San Jose.
After building a 19-point lead early in the second half of the CIF NorCal Division V second-round game against Oroville, the Warriors suddenly couldn’t get the ball up court.
Oroville turned up the heat, not allowing MSJ’s precision offense to get started. The visiting school located just south of Chico found a way to trim the Warriors’ advantage to just seven early in the fourth quarter.
The Fremont school, which had just won its first NCS basketball title last Friday and is the top seed in the NorCal Division V bracket, easily could have crumbled. The stage could have been too big for the school that’s basketball history has been nonexistent since the 1970s.
But instead of folding, MSJ finished the game like it had been there before.
Poised. Polished. No panic.
The Warriors gutted out a 56-46 win over Oroville to open the NorCal playoffs. The Warriors will advance to the NorCal semifinals where they will play Weed High School at home on Saturday.
“We just tried to stay as composed as possible and run what we do best,” center Brandon White, who scored eight points, grabbed 14 rebounds, dished out six assists and had three blocks, said. “We ran our offense well and we played defense.”
Joseph Standfield led MSJ with 24 points to go along with five rebounds. Will Chapman added 20 points and four steals.
After starting its last two games slow and needing to constantly claw its way back in the fourth quarter, MSJ got off to a hot start.
The Warriors led by eight after the first quarter and outscored the Tigers 18-10 in the second quarter to take a 37-21 lead into halftime.
Two free throws from Standfield early in the third quarter gave MSJ a 19-point lead, its largest of the night as it seemed like the Warriors were going to come away with a blowout win.
But the big deficit only made Oroville play more desperate with its season on the line.
The Tigers went to a full-court trap that worked to perfection.
After turning the ball over just three times in the first half, MSJ coughed the ball up 15 times in the final two quarters. Following Standfield’s two free throws, Oroville went on a 17-5 run from the end of the third quarter to the five-minute mark of the fourth.
In crunchtime, with Oroville threatening, the Warriors never panicked.
Instead, the gritty group got multiple stops and stopped turning the ball over in the waning minutes. The Warriors capitalized on a few costly fouls from Oroville, including a technical foul that led to four made free throws from MSJ to rebuild its lead to 11 with just under two minutes remaining.
“We’ve won all our games with our defense,” Chapman said. “So even when our offense wasn’t going great, we were okay with that. We were comfortable.”
MSJ hit just enough free throws in the end to put the game away.
As the final buzzer sounded, MSJ’s student section went crazy, storming the court even after just its first win in the NorCal playoffs.
MSJ coach Mike Kenney said the crowd gave the Warriors an additional boost as most nights, students are often studying and trying to keep up at the prestigious public school.
“With a school like ours, kids on the team and other students have things to do on week nights,” Kenney said. “But they come out. Our guys have a lot of friends.”
MSJ will need to win two more games in order to make it to a state title game at Golden 1 Center in Sacramento. If seeds hold, the Warriors will get a rematch of their NCS Division IV title game against North Bay school Rancho Cotate.