SUNNYVALE — Palo Alto has evolved far more than a typical high school basketball team does over the course of a season.
While almost every team comprised of growing teenagers changes some over the winter months, the Vikings have made a much more rapid transition than most, with five players transitioning from football and the adjustments to a first-year head coach.
Those football players combined for 27 points on Thursday night and the up-tempo transition offense that coach Rodney Tention has installed was as crisp as ever in a 62-47 win over the Carlmont Scots to advance to the CCS Division I Championship and clinch a berth in the CIF State Tournament for a third consecutive year.
“It’s the first time a lot of us have played varsity, and we’ve figured out our roles and how to play with each other,” Jackson Chryst said. “We’ve started bonding with each other and have grown as a family.”
Chryst, an Oregon State-bound quarterback, had 15 points and nine rebounds while Jamir Shepard, a junior wide receiver who received his first Division I offer from the Beavers hours before Thursday’s semifinal, added 10 in a game where Palo Alto (17-9) led by double-digits for almost the entirety of the second half, a massive transformation from an early 68-54 loss to the Scots that came while Chryst, Shepard and three others were still playing football.
“I pride myself in getting to the glass,” Chryst said. “I know I’m there to give toughness and get rebounds, and that’s what I like to do.”
Chryst’s layup just over a minute into the third quarter gave the third-seeded Vikings a 35-24 lead just over a minute into the third quarter as part of a dominant run intersected by halftime that defined the game, which was played at neutral-site Fremont High in Sunnyvale. Paly closed the first half on a 15-4 run and scored the first six points of the second half, led by as much as 14 in the third quarter and built that lead all the way to 19 in the fourth as both teams emptied their benches over the final minutes.
“We just mentally didn’t have it today,” Carlmont head coach Ron Ozorio said. “We weren’t ready to go 100 miles an hour at opening tip.”
Chryst helped the Vikings to a 15-7 advantage on the offensive glass and Marvin Zou, the only player to have seen more than a few minutes per game on last year’s Palo Alto team that reached the Northern California Division I Championship, looked like he played at 100 miles an hour from the opening tip. Zou was tremendous in transition, with 15 points, 10 rebounds and four assists.
“It starts on the defensive end. When we play good defense, play together and stay disciplined, it lets us get out in transition really easily and get easy buckets,” Zou said. “We’ve been running a lot more of our set plays recently and executed them extremely well, which has opened up even more sets.”
Those sets almost all worked to perfection, with the Vikings getting assists on 13 of their 25 made baskets, even with one of their starters, Matt Marzano, picking up two early fouls.
“We have a solid guard rotation and everyone we rotate at guard can shoot,” Zou said. “We were kind of predictable on offensive, running the same plays over and over, but we’ve been switching it up lately, running sets that teams haven’t seen, which has allowed us to get a lot of good looks.”
With Marzano in foul trouble, Anthony Yu, who transferred from St. Joseph Notre Dame before the start of the year, played one of his stronger games, with six points and five assists. His first 3-pointer cut second-seeded Carlmont’s lead to 20-19, starting the 21-4 run that spanned most of the second quarter and the start of the third, while his second opened up a 49-35 lead early in the fourth.
“We moved the ball and took great shots,” Tention said. “When we move the ball, it’s hard to guard us.”
Defensively, the Vikings did an excellent job keeping Carlmont (22-6) off of the perimeter. The Scots hit a pair of early 3-pointers to open up a 10-5 lead, but would hit just two more outside of the first five minutes.
“It was one of our more complete games,” Tention said. “We did a good job of taking away their threes and really defending hard.”
The only stretch of the second half where the Scots could really seem to get anything going was an 8-2 run in the fourth quarter to close to 53-43 with three minutes left, but Palo Alto would slam the door with the next nine points.
“It wasn’t how we were looking to finish it up,” Ozorio said after concluding his second year at Carlmont, a season in which the Scots made it to the CCS semifinals for the first time since 2013 and posted their highest win total since the 2009-10 season. “We’re on our way. It’s a great first step, and we’ll work to get back here next year. We have five quality juniors that are ready to take that baton and do something with it.”
Those juniors saw minimal playing time behind an excellent senior class, though Abram Guldbech played nearly half the game on Thursday with three-year starter David Bedrosian out (concussion). Bedrosian will be graduating along with two other three-year starters, Sho Takahashi and Lajuan Nelson. Nelson scored a game-high 18 points, while 6-foot-6 center Ben Ledwith scored 12 to finish on a high note after struggling for much of February.
“I was having a slow couple of games,” Ledwith said. “It was nice to use my height to my advantage against a team with some short players. I kept the ball high and went up pretty much every time I got it.”
Ledwith had eight early points to give the Scots a 20-16 lead before Palo Alto started forcing them into low-percentage areas. Chryst got the better of him in the paint as the second quarter went on, including a stretch in which the he committed goaltending violations on both ends of the court on consecutive possessions.
As the Vikings began denying Ledwith the ball, Nelson managed to heat up some. He scored at the end of each of the first three quarters, giving Carlmont a 14-13 lead after one and cutting the deficit to 31-24 at halftime. His bank 3-pointer to end the third left the Scots trailing 42-31, but Palo Alto ensured no momentum from any of those baskets would create any sort of a prolonged run.
Though the Scots came up shy of reaching the state tournament for the first time in program history, it was nonetheless an excellent year for a program that had been all but dormant over the better part of the decade, and it’s the sort of success that will help retain players that might otherwise consider going to private schools. Carlmont is located right in between Serra and St. Francis, two schools that have benefited from tons of talented San Carlos kids this decade.
We set a bunch of goals at the start of the season and we accomplished a ton of them,” Ledwith said. “It was nice to have a solid group of players that all really cared about each other.”
