Prep b BB: Tipoff Night at the Holiday Classic

The Saints, with Coach Mike Haupt (center left,
behind #3), before their one-point win
over host Torrey Pines. Gulp, the Vikings have
to face them in league play. (Photo by Ed Piper)
 

By Ed Piper

A lasting image of the preview night before the Holiday Basketball Classic at Torrey Pines High Tues., Dec. 26, was 6'10" Taeshon Cherry, a five-star player for Foothills Christian, talking to himself and hanging on the rim apart from any play his team was making. (He was warned by a referee for the rim-hanging antic.)

La Jolla had to face Cherry, last year's CIF Player of the Year, and his talented mates in the Grossmont Winter Classic last week, and the final score wasn't pretty--though the Vikings upheld their honor by competing full-bore the whole game, diving body-over-body for loose balls and battling the giant, Taeshon, in a physically-bruising contest.

You have to feel for the poor man, appearing in a major showcase before a packed house on the North County campus on the night the Los Angeles Times reports that he allegedly is "Player-8", an unnamed prep star tangled in a supposed web of payola involving Tony Bland, an assistant coach at USC, where Cherry had committed to play, then de-committed last week.

As his grandfather asserts in the Times article, the young man is probably a good person and didn't do anything wrong. He is super-talented, and despite his distractedness and lack of intensity, he still had a dominant role in the Knights surviving a late attack by Mater Dei.

By then, however, much of the large crowd had headed for the exits in the two-tier high school gym. The Foothills-Mater Dei matchup was created to be the feature game at 8 p.m., but many basketball fans left after St. Augustine, using an almost all-sophomore lineup led by 6'5" Chibuzo Agbo, eked out a one-point win over host Torrey Pines, the number-one ranked team in the county.

It was like the air was let out of the bag after the Saints' exciting win. St. Augustine, of course, has a large alumni base that, not infrequently, creates big crowds at their football and basketball games. This occasion was no different. Plus the Falcons, being the tournament organizers, were the home team--the only one with a student cheering section at the tripleheader Tuesday night. A long line of exiters immediately formed in the main aisles on both sides of the court at the conclusion of the Saints' victory.

Earlier, in the opening game at 5 p.m., Country Day's 62-50 win over a bad-shooting Mission Bay squad provided another lasting image: Ryan Langborg, the Torreys' 6'4" star junior, skying to block two Buc shots at the basket in the first half, then hitting key shots to nail down the victory in the second. (The Vikings had to deal with Langborg, too, in the Grossmont tourney.) Country Day's big man, 6'9" Jayson Taylor, who didn't do a lot against La Jolla, absolutely controlled the key against Mission Bay, stunning the Bucs with repeated blocks way up high.

My vantage point on the walkway above one basket was fabulous for viewing the action. And it led to a fortuitous meeting with a man I hadn't known previously, Steve Strommen, a retired U.S. History teacher and basketball coach from Bloomington, Minnesota ("That's where the Vikings had their stadium," Steve reminded me), a snowbird spending yet another winter here. Heavily tanned, looking active in shorts with tennis shoes, the long-time coach--whose father was a coach before him--also knows a ton of basketball and provided lots of detail.

We were reminiscing about our own days playing basketball long ago during one of the three games. I recalled telling a student how we used to have a jump ball after every tie-up, which the teenager couldn't believe. "When my dad played," Steve told me, "they jumped the ball up after every basket." I had read that, but since forgotten it. Asked what years that would have been, he said, "In the 40's."

When Mission Bay went down by 15 points late in the game, I asked the retired coach what you do with your team at this point. "You've tried everything by this point. It's too late," he said.

After the Saints' cliffhanger 69-68 win over Torrey Pines, I went down to the floor to tap a sweaty Mike Haupt, coach at St. Augustine, on the back for a comment. "What did you see in your kids?" I asked him, right after the player handshakes. "Toughness. I saw toughness the whole game. What did you see?" he said, turning to me. I said, "The same. Toughness. You play a physical defense." Haupt: "We do." The referees let them play on this night, which led to a clean, but rough-and-tumble, trio of games.

I was later able to Google Steve Strommen's name. He was so modest and would not have trumpeted his own horn, but I found he was inducted into the Bloomington Sports Hall of Fame in Minnesota in 2012 for his coaching of boys basketball, girls basketball, and baseball at Kennedy High. He retired in the early 2000's.