SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO, Ca. – On a Friday night when the Trinity Leagues’ 1-2 teams – Mater Dei and St. John Bosco – lost in their CIF Southern Section Open Division pool-play openers, the rest of the league fared quite well in other divisions.
JSerra (65-56 over Santa Clarita Christian), Div. 1; Santa Margarita (82-63 over Palos Verdes) and Orange Lutheran (48-43, vs. Westlake), Div. 2AA; and Servite (71-69, in overtime, vs. Aliso Niguel), Div. 2A, each knocked off visiting opponents in Round of 16 playoff action.
JSerra improved to 14-12 with the Lions’ wire-to-wire victory, during which they scored the first eight points of the contest against the visitors by way of Canyon Country, which – after losing their first three games – came into one of the southern-most portions of Orange County with a 7-5 record.
Coach Keith Wilkinson’s team held a 16-point advantage at intermission then had to withstand the deep jump shooting of senior forward Tiago Soares (23 points, including six 3s) and sophomore guard Maurice Wright Jr. (13 and three 3s, all of those behind-the-arc successes coming in the third quarter) to hold off the Cardinals for the second season in a row in playoff action.
The visitors scored the first bucket of the fourth quarter to get to within three (47-44) before junior guards Isaac Peralta and Robert Diaz – who started their prep careers elsewhere – got crackin’.
Peralta (who spent his freshman season at Mater Dei) scored nine of his game-high 27 points over the final eight minutes while Diaz (a standout as a freshman and sophomore at Millikan in Long Beach) added six points in the fourth quarter to finish with 12.
Peralta (pictured) played with seemingly boundless pep-to-his step from the opening tip, hitting nine of 13 shots from the floor (he got into the lane at will). He tanked his opportunity to go for 30-plus by missing five of 13 free throws.
The Lions won’t have to travel far – 2.2 miles and, if I recall accurately, about three stop lights, going northwest to the outer edge of Mission Viejo – for their Tuesday night quarterfinal.
They’ll get a rematch when they visit the Capistrano Valley Cougars, a club that beat them on their homecourt, 63-57, on March 29 during their second game of the pandemic-altered season.
Making the contest even more tantalizing . . . Wilkinson was a 6-foot-10 standout – and one of the best-ever jump-shooting “bigs” in Orange County history – at Capistrano Valley under Coach Brian Mulligan before going on to play for Tim Floyd at USC.
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