Publication Date: Friday, January 30, 2004
BOYS' PREP BASKETBALL
There's a driving
There's a driving
(January 30, 2004)desire to succeed
After years of being mediocre, Mid-Peninsula is off
to its best start and has a shot at making history
by Keith Peters
The history of the Mid-Peninsula High boys' basketball team is a bit hazy. In fact, no one knows for sure when the school played its first game.
Al Klein, the school's interim athletic director, thinks it might have been 1990 or 1991. To be sure, he checked with Mid-Peninsula's "detail guy," Dave Richardson.
"He thought he had a box score," Klein said, "but it was from baseball."
Mid-Peninsula certainly is no basketball factory. There are no championship banners hanging in the gym. There are no archives. No history book. No league records. No trophy cases.
What is known about this program, aside from losing more games than winning, is the team has made three appearances in the Central Coast Section tournament. The first was in 1993-94, the second in 2000-01 and the third last year.
Now, in the 10th anniversary of that first CCS appearance, the Dragons are in the midst of their finest season ever.
Heading into the second half of the Christian Private Schools Athletic League season, Mid-Peninsula is 7-0 and 13-4 (overall). The Dragons are averaging 69.2 points a game and allowing 45.5 after holding off visiting North Valley Baptist on Tuesday, 65-62.
Moreover, the roster is deeper than ever and the talent level is the highest ever.
Curtis Haggins, in his second year as head coach, has the tiny school of fewer than 150 students poised for big things.
"He has taken this thing way beyond where we've been before," said Klein, who coached the 2000-01 team to the CCS playoffs. "It's not only the most talented team, but the most coachable team ever. They want to learn and, they want to play basketball."
Haggins has had an impact in a number of ways. First, Klein said, "he's a good coach."
That probably stems from his experience of playing at Menlo-Atherton and Woodside highs, and then at Canada College. He was a standout guard at all three schools.
Haggins' reputation helped attract players like current senior Da'Ron Maxie, the team's leading scorer who's only in his second year of organized ball at the high school level. Maxie, a 6-foot-1 point guard who could play most anywhere in the CCS, went into Tuesday's showdown against North Valley Baptist averaging 23.3 points a game in league play. He scored 20 in the Dragons' win Tuesday, has a season high of 31 and hasn't scored less than 19 points in any league game.
Walter Washington, a burly 6-4 junior, contributed 16 points against NVB and has plenty of untapped talent. Reggie Demery is another promising junior while 6-3 freshman Bruce Grady, who tallied 14 points Tuesday including a free throw with 10 seconds to play, is another building block for future success.
Add in 6-2 sophomore David Cruz, 6-6 senior Matt Payne, 6-2 forward Jason Stergion and sophomore guard Ben Capon, and the Dragons are well set for a championship run.
Making that goal more accessible is the fact defending champion Eastside Prep (4-0, 19-1) is ineligible to defend its title. The Panthers decided to play only half the CPSAL season in order to upgrade their schedule with more nonleague and tournament games. That means Mid-Peninsula essentially holds a two-game lead over its closest rival, North Valley Baptist (5-2), in the race for the CPSAL crown.
While last season's 18-8 squad holds the school record for most victories and won the first postseason game in school history, this year's team has all kinds of milestones within its grasp. The Dragons are only six wins away from breaking last year's mark, could win the first league title in school annals and advance further in the CCS playoffs than ever before.
Those are a few reasons why the players' commitment to the team has been so strong this season.
"We have some players who could be getting more minutes," Haggins said, "but they realize what's at stake and want to be a part of it. They've bought into the concept to make history. This is something they could remember of the rest of their lives."
While there's still eight CPSAL games to play in the second half of the season, including an expected loss at Eastside Prep on Feb. 5, Mid-Peninsula is much closer to reaching its goals than in the program's formative years. That's when the school was housed on the former Garland Elementary School campus in Palo Alto, and the basketball team played its games in the old Cubberley High Pavilion.
Damon True, a biology teacher at Mid-Pen, was the boys' basketball coach from 1993-95 and the first to lead the Dragons into the CCS tournament in 1993-94. They finished 10-9 in Division V that year, led by True's younger brother, Quentin. He averaged nearly 25 points a game as a junior and proved even more explosive his senior year when he poured in a school-record 53 points in one game.
While Quentin True's scoring outburst in 1994-95 was a highlight, the low point of the school's program also was that season when two incidences of "inappropriate behavior" led to the cancellation of the final six games of the season.
The team hit rock bottom after that, going 2-16 in 1995-96, 3-14 in 1998-99 and then 0-14 in 1999-00.
Klein took over the following year and got his team to play hard. That commitment paid off in a 10-12 season that was capped by another appearance in the CCS tournament.
By the time the 2001-02 season rolled around, the Dragons had a new coach in Mike McCarton and a new gym alongside their new campus building on Willow Road in Menlo Park. McCarton went a respectable 5-5 in league (10-11 overall), then turned the program over to Haggins.
The rest, they say, is history - which continues to be written by the current players.
"This is, by far, the best team we've had in basketball," said Damon True, who was in the stands Tuesday cheering the Dragons to their win over North Valley Baptist. "My brother was as good as Walter (Washington) and Da'Ron (Maxie), but he was the only one I had."
Athletics in the early '90s were never the focus at Mid-Pen, nor is it now. Academics, and its small student-to-teacher ratio, is why parents pay nearly $20,000 a year, even though athletics has provided an outlet for some of the current athletes. Some, in fact, might not be in line for a high school diploma without the opportunity given them by Mid-Peninsula.
It's an opportunity the players are taking advantage of this season. While it's too early to be building any trophy cases, the Mid-Peninsula boys' basketball team is building something for the future.
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