Frank Burlison

REDONDO BEACH, Ca. – Six favorites advanced with relative ease, while two more teams had a rougher go of it before advancing to the championship quarterfinals of the 62^nd Pacific Shores Tournament in the opening Monday night of the Southern California high school hoops season Monday night at Redondo Union High.

Top-seed St. John Bosco (84-35 over Palos Verdes, with a running clock in the fourth quarter), No. 2 Westchester (69-41 over Peninsula), host and three-seed Redondo (76-39 over Morningside) and four-seed Compton (74-66 over Narbonne) advanced to the Tuesday’s quarters by an average margin of victory of 30.5 points.

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  LAGUNA NIGUEL, Ca. – The Southern California high school hoops season tips off today and in grand fashion, too.

  A half-dozen of the BurlisonOnBasketball Southern California Top 30 teams – including Bellflower St. John Bosco and L.A. Westchester – are part of the 16-team field in the Pacific Shores Tournament being held at Redondo Union High in Redondo Beach.

  If the seeding in the tourney holds up, those two clubs will hook up in the championship game on Saturday night.

  Another potentially terrific tournament gets underway Tuesday at Corona Centennial.

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PARKER, Co. – Sunday the opportunity was at hand for the high school hoopsters to show their – uh, no pun intended – stuff on Day II of the first-ever Pangos All-Colorado Camp at Legend High.

And a whole bunch of them did just that.

Four seniors who plan to sign national letters of intent this week didn’t need to show up.

After all, they’ve already earned their scholarships.

But show up they did – while showing out quite impressively, thank you very much.

One of those 12^th-graders, Dominique Collier (Denver East), could have driven to Boulder to watch his future college program, the University of Colorado Buffalos, play host to Tennessee-Martin late Sunday afternoon.

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PARKER, Co. – What perspective was to be gathered from the middle school day of play during the first-ever Pangos All-Colorado Camp Saturday at Legend High in this suburb of Denver?

It’s quite simple, really:

There are quite a few promising seventh- and eighth-grade male hoopsters in Colorado – and a few pretty gifted sixth-graders, as well.

Approximately 90 players participated and were spread among 10 teams, each of those playing twice before the competition wrapped up in mid-afternoon with one all-star game made up of sixth- and seventh-graders and another for the eighth graders who impressed yours truly along with Christian Popoola (Las Vegas-based Elite Athletic Training), Joel Francisco (the Long Beach, California-based recruiting analyst for ESPN.com

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            LAGUNA NIGUEL, Ca. – And so it’s upon us  . . .

The 2013-14 college hoops season has its official tipoff today (Nov. 8).

What follows are my projected teams to be playing in the second week of the tournament.

The first four, naturally (do the math), are the teams I think have the best shot of getting to the Final Four.

These picks are pretty much, with a few tweaks, in the order that I projected for Lindy’s College Basketball Yearbook.

There is inevitably a “Final Four surprise”.

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