DANVILLE – San Ramon Valley’s girls basketball team is not particularly tall, with no player standing over 6-foot-1.
And yet, against one of the South Bay’s most storied programs and a team famed for its shooting prowess, the Danville school made Pinewood seem as if it was running sets against skyscrapers in a phone booth on Wednesday night.
The secret to the Wolves’ success in the NorCal Open Division first round game?
San Ramon Valley, the third seed, switched on almost every screen both on- and off-ball against sixth seed Pinewood.
Rather than try to fight through traffic and possibly lose a lethal shooter, Ella Gunderson, Carly Stern and company instead passed along their assignment to the nearest teammate.
The faces guarding Pinewood’s scorers changed, but the result remained the same regardless of who was defending the ball.
The tactic worked so brilliantly that Pinewood went 10 minutes without scoring in the second half of a game SRV won 56-32.
“They understand the help, and the help the helper, and the switch and the hedge and all of that, and they just execute it so well that you don’t really need a traditional shot blocker,” SRV coach John Cristiano said. “If your mentality is no middle court, ice the edges, don’t go around the edges … it’s hard to get into the paint.”
The offense wasn’t too shabby, either, in San Ramon Valley’s first victory in three Open Division appearances.
Gunderson led the Wolves with 14 points, Rudd and Stern each scored nine, and SRV as a team made 11 3-pointers as San Ramon Valley turned a 25-22 halftime lead into a rout with a 16-0 run from the early third quarter to the mid-fourth.
That run included two Kaitlyn Mills three-pointers and five points by Maya Knapp.
Cristiano made sure to give Pinewood coach Doc Scheppler his props after the game, noting that the longtime coach had mentored him when Cristiano was starting out as a coach a decade ago.
“He took me under his wing, and he taught me everything I know about basketball,” Cristiano said.
As the scoreboard showed, Doc taught him well.
The hosts had dabbled with the switch-everything scheme in its 76-43 blowout of Acalanes in the North Coast Section championship game victory on Saturday.
But the Wolves embraced it against a Pinewood team that had given Bay Area News Group No.1-ranked Mitty everything it could handle in the Central Coast Section Open title bout, and beaten SRV 57-52 in the regular season.
Aside from contesting almost every shot, San Ramon Valley dominated in the rebounding department and got multiple second chances thanks to good work by Stern, Rudd and Maya Knapp.
“We knew they could all shoot,” Stern said. “And the last game we played against them, we did not rebound, and rebounding changed the game for us.”
Pinewood did get open shots, both from behind the line and in the paint, on more than one occasion. But the usually-knockdown snipers could not get one to go through the rim.
Jolyn Ding led Pinewood with eight points, and her fearless drives to the rim were one of the few bright spots for the Panther offense.
Scheppler acknowledged his team’s open misses, he also showered praise on San Ramon Valley’s senior-less team.
“You don’t get to be great shooters and great players without putting in time in the gym, so I know the work they put in, and it manifests itself in that they played well in a big game,” Scheppler said of SRV. “I think that mentally, their girls have a great mindset, and they were physical and they were strong.”
San Ramon Valley’s strength will be tested in the semifinal on Saturday against perhaps the best team in NorCal.
The Wolves will take the long drive to the Fresno area and play 32-0 Clovis West, a team that is experienced, talented and athletic.
But with confidence sky-high and on a winning streak that is now at 14 games, San Ramon Valley likes its chances of advancing to its first NorCal Open Division final.
“They have a really good press, so we’re going to need to work on that,” Mills said. “But I like our chances.”
