Coaches love their stars and role players alike.
Foothill has one of those valuable role players in 6-foot-2 junior Lucas Araujo.
When Foothill’s All-CIF forward, senior Eric Patton, missed a few games because of the flu, players like Araujo kept the Knights winning.
“Lucas thinks he’s a guard,” Foothill coach Rusty Van Cleave said, “but he can fit in nicely in the post, too. He’s always willing to do whatever we ask him to do.”
Patton recovered from the virus and has been playing for the Knights in the Orange Holiday Classic.
Jump stops around the county basketball scene:
• The Orange Holiday Classic has been at Hope International University in Fullerton the past two years instead of Chapman University because the Chapman men’s team is playing games this week at Chapman. Orange Holiday organizer Craig Abercrombie said it is probable that the tournament will be at Hope next year, too.
• Like so many other players, Edison guard Brae Ivey admires Canyon’s defensive intensity and how hard the Comanches players work on that part of the game. “They all take charges and things like that,” Ivey said. “We need to get more like that.”
• Many county rosters will improve next week. The 30-day sit-out period for transfers elapses Monday. Student-athletes who made a residence change as part of their transfer are immediately eligible at their new school; those who did not make the residence change must sit out the first 30 days of the season.
• The roster that might improve the most is one that’s already good. Santa Margarita will have brothers Noah and Kaden Rasheed available on Jan. 5. They transferred to Santa Margarita from Mission Viejo where both were key players on last year’s CIF-Southern Section 1AA finalist.
• Santa Margarita freshman Race Parks, son of former NBA, Duke and Marina star Cherokee Parks, has played some minutes for the varsity this month but likely will be getting more educational minutes the rest of the season on the Eagles freshman team.
• Mater Dei’s Rex Plueger won a slam-dunk competition at the MaxPreps Holiday Classic. Pflueger, a 6-foot-6 senior guard who signed with Notre Dame, had a good bag of tricks, including jumping over a standing teammate on the way to the basket for a dunk. Highlights are on youtube.com and elsewhere.
• Mater Dei plays its first on-campus home game Jan. 9 with a Trinity League game against JSerra. That’s the night Mater Dei honors Coach Gary McKnight for becoming the first basketball coach in California history to win 1,000 games.
• Other Trinity League games that day are Servite at Orange Lutheran and St. John Bosco at Santa Margarita.
• North teams won eight of the 12 games in the Orange County North/South Challenge at El Toro High last week. A player of the game was selected for each game. They were: Isaac Wulff, Laguna Beach; Brandon Smith, Godinez; Candrall Lumanlan, Aliso Niguel; Brent Cahill, St. Margaret’s; Eyassu Worku, Los Alamitos; Ivey, Edison; Eric Yang, Valencia; Grant Vis, Huntington Beach; Elijah Mosham, El Dorado; Trey Jordan, El Toro; Matt Ctrvlik, Corona del Mar, and Greg Blanchard, Foothill.
• County basketball’s top five scorers: Cahill, 27.6 points per game; Trevor Treinen, Servite, 24.0; Jarrett Brodbeck, Esperanza, 23.8; Josh Rodriguez, Sonora, 23.8; and Legend Demps, El Modena, 23.1.
• El Modena’s Isaiah Glover leads the county in 3-point shots made with 61. Rodriguez is second in the county in that category with 37.
• The Sunset League vs. Pacific Coast League Basketball Challenge, a one-day fundraising series of three games matching teams from the two leagues Jan. 7 at Edison, has a “Hoops 4 Hope” theme. Part of the event is a “Lay-Up For Lauren Challenge” in which for $5 (children) or $10 (ages 13 and older) are spun around five times before attempting weak-handed layups. Proceeds from that, games admission and snack bar sales go to pediatric brain cancer research.
• The Sunset-Pacific Coast games that day are University vs. Fountain Valley, 4:30 p.m.; Irvine vs. Huntington Beach, 6 p.m.; and Corona del Mar vs. Edison, 7:30 p.m.
• A running clock comes into play in all CIF-sanctioned games when the margin reaches 40 points in the fourth quarter.
Contact the writer: sfryer@ocregister.com
