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Clayton Pioneer • www.claytonpioneer.com
February 25, 2011
Clayton Sports Undefeated CV teams earn home NCS playoff games JAY BEDECARRÉ Clayton Pioneer
Holding home games in the North Coast Section playoffs can be a lot of work for the host school, but it’s a task Clayton Valley High School athletic director Pat Middendorf relishes having to repeat often. Generally speaking, the topseeded teams have their playoff games at home, and Middendorf has three teams who fill that description this winter. The boys and girls soccer teams and girls basketball squad all completed undefeated seasons in the Diablo Valley Athletic League. Coach Bernard Barnes’ girl hoopsters brought home the first league title in their sport to CVHS since 1999. They had a 12-0 record in the DVAL, which included ending a 28-game winning streak of two-time defending champ Northgate and then beating the Broncos 46-34 in a rematch to ensure the Eagles sole rights to the crown. Last year, both the boys and girls soccer teams claimed DVAL championships and then co-hosted a NCS playoff doubleheader – where each Eagle team lost at Gonsalves Stadium. This year, the boys of coach Rory Gentry and girls of Scott Booth defended their league titles without losing a game. The girls didn’t even surrender a goal in DVAL play. They then reversed their opening NCS playoff results by sweeping firstround playoff games last week
Photo courtesy Scott Anderson
NORTHGATE HIGH SCHOOL DOMINATED THE PAST TWO DVAL BASKETBALL SEASONS but Clayton Valley ended the Broncos 28-game league winning streak in January and came back to match that victory with a 46-34 win Feb. 11 to wrap up CVHS’s first girls basketball league title since 1999. The Eagles celebrated their second win over Northgate on the Walnut Creek school’s court.
as each team won its 16th game of the season. The CVHS boys scored on a penalty kick in the dying moments of the game for a 3-2 win over Mt. Eden of the Hayward league, while the Eagle girls edged Liberty of Brentwood 2-1. Gentry’s boys
had a pair of draws with Ygnacio Valley while winning the rest of their DVAL games. The girls were 12-0 unbeaten, unscored upon league champs. For the girl cagers, it’s been a season with five players leading various statistical categories for the team. Seniors Sarah Nelson
and Gina Del Bene pace the team in blocks and steals, respectively. Juniors Molly Kommer and Karley Menez top the team ladder in rebounds and three-point shooting. Their sophomore teammate Ashley Allen is the leading scorer (14.3 points per game) and assist
maker (3.3) for the Eagles. She also is pulling down four rebounds and making 2.3 steals per game. “I’ve been coaching for 14 years and Ashley is the most gifted player – including boys – in terms of pure athleticism that I’ve coached,” Barnes said. “She
has the rare combination of speed and quickness. Most people don’t understand the difference, but if you watch her play you will understand. She is strong, agile and has explosive jumping ability.” Clayton Valley had high hopes this season after the team felt it let a chance for the league title slip away a year ago. They lost two of their first seven nonleague games, but since Dec. 14 they have run off 19 consecutive victories – bringing a 24-2 record into NCS play in Don Della gymnasium. “We struggled early in the season and without Ashley we probably would have dropped some of those games. She plays with unbelievable confidence. She will come to me during a game and say, ‘I can take the girl guarding me.’ I don’t want people to get the wrong idea about her saying that. She just believes in her ability,” Barnes said. “The great thing for us and bad for everyone else is that she is only a sophomore and getting better. “We have the luxury of being a very talented team, where any night one of our players will lead in scoring,” the coach added. “If it were just on Ashley’s shoulders, then I think it would be too much for her as she’s still learning. In recent weeks, she is playing at an amazing level. She is just as great a person as she is a player. I’m lucky that I get to coach her and not coach against her.”
Swimming in Clayton? There’s only one Victor for all seasons JAY BEDECARRÉ Clayton Pioneer
When it comes to swimming in Clayton, there’s one person who stands above all others. And he traveled more than 6,000 miles to make Clayton the center of his (water)world. Serge Victor has been the aquatics and fitness director at Oakhurst Country Club since 1998 and he’s now added another title back on his resume as head coach of the Dana Hills Swim Team. Victor, who coached the DHST Otters in 1994 and 1995, now oversees both local summer recreation swim teams as well as a fall program at Oakhurst that he’s offered local rec swimmers since 2002. But don’t think Victor is
done. He’s interested in starting a masters swimming program at Oakhurst as well as offering infant and adult swim lessons there. The local swimming dynamo was raised in the Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. He was an elite distance freestyle swimmer who competed “at the national level” but was not quite good enough to reach Olympic status. He defected to the United States in 1989, just a couple years before the fall of the Soviet Union when Ukraine regained status as an independent country. He became an American citizen in 1995. During his first stint at Dana Hills, his Otters team won a pair of Concord City Championships in the A Division and took second in B
Division each year. They lost the 1995 Contra Costa County Meet championship by a couple points. It was a disappointing result as the Otters had a swimmer who would have scored enough points at the meet to make them Division I champs disqualified as being too old by a county rule that was overturned the following year. “We had quite a team with Erin Dobratz, Matt Biel, Michael Gausman, the Nelson kids, Richard Wells and so many fantastic relay teams,” Victor reminisces. Biel went on to compete in a pair of U.S. Olympic Trails, while Gausman swam for University of Southern California and Dobratz got a bronze medal with the USA synchronized swim team at the 2004 Olympics.
LONG COACHING HISTORY Victor worked under famed Olympic coach Mark Schubert at USC, where he coached superstar Janet Evans, and for Villanova University in Philadelphia before coming to Clayton the first time. He also had been an age group coach with the Terrapins USS team in Concord. He then spent several years at UC Berkeley with another coaching stalwart, Nort Thornton. His coaching odyssey took him to San Francisco, Moraga and Tempe, Ariz., before he came back to the area to take the supervisory reins at Oakhurst and a summer coaching role with the East County Stingrays in Antioch. He founded the Oakhurst Orcas swim team and, over the past 10 years, he’s selected, man-
aged, scheduled and trained their coaching staff. He’s also worked with country club staff to develop other aquatics programs for the Oakhurst membership. He’s proud of young coaches such as Charles Kennedy, Gausman, Kasey Harris, Katherine Taber and Jane Robinson whom he recruited to and mentored at Oakhurst. Victor is putting the finishing touches on his 2011 Oakhurst coaching staff, and he’ll soon be sitting down with the Orca coaches to lay out his team training program for this year. The Orcas swim team has won the Concord City Meet sportsmanship award three times since 2004, including in 2010.
See Victor, page 12
Tamara Steiner/Clayton Pioneer
SERGE VICTOR is “the man” when it comes to swimming in Clayton. He oversees all the aquatics and fitness programs at Oakhurst Country Club including the Oakhurst Orcas swim team and also will be head coach of the Dana Hills Swim Team again this summer.
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