SAN FRANCISCO — It may be doing it with a completely different roster and different head coach from the past two years, but Palo Alto is one win away from appearing in a third straight CIF Northern California Championship after Thursday’s 56-52 win over Stuart Hall at Kezar Pavilion.
“These kids understand the tradition of winning at Palo Alto,” head coach Rodney Tention said. Though it’s Tention’s first year leading the Vikings, his son, Miles, was their point guard during the 2017 run.
Just like they’ve done the past two years, the Vikings gutted out a road win, this time holding on after the fourth-seeded Knights came back from a 12-point deficit.
Miles Amos wasn’t going without with a fight for Stuart Hall (28-6), scoring a game-high 24 points. He scored every point of the 12-4 run that the Knights went on to close the third quarter to get within two, and his team would tie the game twice early in the fourth on baskets by Jay-Henry Ryan and Alex Byrd.
Unfortunately for the Knights, both times they scored to even the game up, Jackson Chryst was there to respond for 12th-seeded Palo Alto (20-9). The Oregon State-bound quarterback scored all nine of his points in the fourth quarter to ensure he wouldn’t be thinking too much about football for at least a few more days. After he gave Paly a 41-39 lead, his top wide receiver, Jamir Shepard, hit a huge 3-pointer from the wing.
Sophomore Nigel Burris (11 points) would close the gap to one for The Hall, but Matt Marzano answered with another three, and the Vikings would go up seven on three more points by Chryst, including a tip-in with 1:45 left after Palo Alto ran the shot clock down on the sort of play that experienced teams seem to always make in key situations.
“Last year I learned the professional side of taking every game as a business trip from the upperclassmen,” Chryst said.
With two Marzano free throws, the Knights could have folded, but they put together one last push over the final minute. Having gone without a 3-pointer for the first 31 minutes, they hit three over the final 60 seconds, with Amos and Burris connecting to get within three, sandwiched around a missed Palo Alto free throw. Marzano then split a pair at the line to make it 53-49, and after a Burris 3-point attempt with a hand in his face went halfway down before rattling out, Marzano again split two from the charity stripe. One last 3-pointer by Amos cut the lead to two, but Chryst made a pair of free throws with 9.6 left to clinch the victory.
It was a victory that looked far more comfortable in the first half, as Palo Alto opened up a 29-18 halftime lead, employing a 2-3 zone to slow the Knights down, rather than the up-tempo style the Vikings usually play.
“They’re a very good transition team,” Tention said. “We had to have two guys back.”
It certainly threw the Knights off, as they were prepared for the Vikings to run with them.
“It kinda caught us off guard,” Amos said. “We expected a run-and-gun, man-on-man game, so when they threw it into zone, we had to switch up the rotations.”
It spelled the end of an illustrious career at Stuart Hall for Amos, whose accolades include two BCL West titles, with this year’s being an outright championship. The Knights also won their league tournament this year and won last year’s Northern California Division IV title.
“We accomplished history,” he said. “I can’t thank the coaches enough for this.”
Though he, Byrd and Spencer O’Brien-Steele all graduate, Burris will be around for two more years, and both Ryan and Tomas Wolber are only juniors.
“The future’s bright,” Amos said. I look forward to coming back and watching them play. They’ve just got to put in the work in the offseason like we did this year.”
While the Knights got stronger during the offseason, Palo Alto’s rise has been much more rapid. Chryst, Shepard, Wes Walters and Lou Passarello all came from the football team at the end of November to join a team that had minimal experience to begin with. Marzano was a on the roster as a sophomore but saw minimal time, and Marvin Zou only saw sporadic minutes off the bench.
“You don’t have a lot of guys with varsity experience,” said Marzano, who scored a team-high 16. “As time went on, we got smarter, and now we’re a real team.”
Shepard scored 12 off the bench, Passarello had two points and defending the post in the first half and Walters finished with eight, including six in the third quarter.
“Those football guys helped them play more physical than the last time we played them,” Stuart Hall head coach Charley Johnson said.
On December 6, a nascent Vikings squad fell 47-42 to Stuart Hall in the Burlingame Lions Club Invitational. Less than three months later, they’re two wins from playing for a state championship, following in the footsteps of a group that included Jared Wulbrun, who was in attendance at Kezar Pavilion for Thursday’s victory.
“Those guys paved a path for us, and we’re just trying to do what they did,” Marzano said.
