More area teams accept challenge of Modesto Christian boys basketball tournament

For much of the 15-year history of the Modesto Christian Holiday Hoop Classic, finding local teams willing to enter was a challenge for tournament organizers.

There was little incentive for teams within the Stanislaus District to commit to the 16-team event, since the competition would be fierce and the Sac-Joaquin Section used overall team records in its selection of playoff teams at the end of the regular season.

But now that the section chooses teams strictly according to league standings (although it still uses overall record in the seedings process) coaches have the option to use the preseason as an opportunity to play up, to challenge their teams with a schedule designed more to foster growth and maturity rather than to accumulate wins.

“It’s all about the competition,” said Patterson coach Brian de la Porte, whose Tigers will make their MC tourney debut Friday at 7 p.m. against the host Crusaders. “We play a lot of playoff teams in the preseason to prepare us for league. There’s nobody in our league whose preseason schedule is as tough as ours, and that’s to our advantage.”

The Holiday Hoop Classic tips off at 10 a.m. Friday with Weston Ranch, which last week reached the finals of the Holiday Invitational Tournament in Fresno, battling Pleasant Grove. In addition to MC, Patterson and Weston Ranch, Gregori and Turlock also are in the field.

“It’s great to have Patterson in it this year and there has been a lot of interest in recent years from local teams wanting to get in,” said MC coach Richard Midgley. “I know that I look at the level of our team every year and try to schedule tough competition, because it’s a great learning point and it helps me as a coach.

“The losses help the teams and coaches refocus on what needs to be done. In the same way, the local teams coming here to play will get a good self-evaluation from the really good competition. They’ll be able to take that and focus in practice on what they need to do to get better.”

For all the Crusaders’ success since 1996, a run that has included a record 16 section titles, this tournament never has been a cakewalk. MC hasn’t won its own event since 2005, when 22 points from Adrian Oliver led the Crusaders over Taft. And in 2009, the Crusaders – with Isaiah Burse among the key players only a week removed from winning a small-schools state football bowl – went 0-4 in the event, then went on to claim a section title.

While the host team always saves its largest goals – section and state titles – for the end of the season, the Holiday Hoop Classic ranks high on their wish lists. The desire to win the event is spurred by the quality of the field, but also because many former players – including those whose college and professional jerseys hang in the MC gym foyer – use the event as an unofficial homecoming.

“It means a lot to see the guys come back,” said senior center Anthony Townes, whose University of the Pacific jersey will appear next year when he joins the Tigers. “It shows how hard they worked to get to where they are now and it makes us want to work that much harder to reach where they reached.

“For us, winning this tournament is probably right up there, second on our list to the state tournament. We haven’t won this tournament in a very long time, so we need to win it.”

For the vast majority of local teams, winning the Holiday Hoop Classic is a dream of far-reaching proportion. But then, just try to find a high school kid who takes the court thinking his team is going to lose.

Instilling that confidence and maintaining it through defeats is the No. 1 job of coaches at every level, and it’s also one of the reasons de la Porte has wanted to have a team in this tournament for several years, even in his previous coaching stint at Ceres.

“I spoke to MC a couple times when I was at Ceres, and was on their wait list,” de la Porte said. “I made a big push right away when I came to Patterson. I hope we get invited back for the next few years because we have some great freshmen and sophomore players in the program.”

And how does he feel about playing the hosts in the first round?

“Hey, we got the prime-time game. It’s going to be fun.”

This story was originally published December 23, 2014 at 2:04 PM with the headline "More area teams accept challenge of Modesto Christian boys basketball tournament."