Oceana High School in north Pacifica has no football team. Its enrollment is a modest 650. And it has a school newspaper humorously dubbed “The Weekly Fog."
The school also has one of the most entertaining girls basketball teams in the Central Coast Section. The Sharks are good, too, currently sharing the top spot in the Peninsula Athletic League-North with South San Francisco.
A glimpse into the soul of the Sharks came with 40 seconds left in the third quarter of a 55-47 win Friday night against host El Camino. Taking a pass on the right side of the key, 4-foot-9 Angelyne (Angel) Dayrit saw a crevice and dribbled hard to the basket and made a circus underhand shot between two taller Colt defenders.
“Ooohh,” the big crowd at El Camino for Senior Night marveled.
Ooohh is right. These Oceana girls can play and they’re fun to watch as well.
“We’re really fast-paced and we can come back even if we’re down,” said one of the team’s taller players, senior Nandi Eskridge. “All our starters are scorers. You can try to shut one of us down and double-team us, but someone else will get hot.”
DIVERSE
Oceana is known as one of the most ethnically diverse schools in the Bay Area – a small public school with a college prep curriculum and block scheduling. It’s a project-based school whose seniors are required to do papers 15 to 17 pages in length to graduate. Students attend three classes per day, each lasting 100 minutes.
The school’s melting-pot diversity is reflected in the Sharks’ list of top players which consists of Dayrit and sophomore 5-3 guard Ariana Margate who are Filipina, Kyana Wiley who is half Filipina and half African-American, Sara (Sala) Langi who is Tongan, 5-foot Keri La who is Chinese and Eskridge who is African-American.
“We’ve got it covered,” quipped Oceana coach David Clark, an African-American, off-campus coach who hails from Los Angeles. “In our locker room we should put up a flag of where everyone’s from, or their heritage.”
The delightful brew of talent is not lost on the girls; they’ve noticed.
“We talk about that a lot,” Eskridge said. “We’re from different backgrounds and you can really tell in our styles of play that we come from different parts of the Bay Area, but we (meld) together well.”
Yeah, they do. And did I mention they're fun to watch? Langi, Wiley and Eskridge are all pushing 6 feet and they can score in a half-court set or by driving to the hoop. The long-haired La is an outside sniper for the Sharks, as are Dayrit and Margate, a pair of pony-tailed marvels who swish 3-pointers and are pests on defense.
Margate, a slender sophomore, scored 20 points a few weeks ago in an important win at Half Moon Bay, making six 3-pointers. Against El Camino on Friday night she watched the passing lanes like a hawk, picking off six Colt passes to go along with scoring a team-high 14 points.
NO RESPECT
Despite Oceana’s 18 victories which came in part against larger schools like San Mateo, South San Francisco, El Camino, HMB and Jefferson, the Sharks feel dis-respected – the little school from Pacifica with no football team, no hype and no invitations to prestigious one-day events.
“We’re definitely the underdogs,” Dayrit said. “We have been the underdogs since I started playing at Oceana. People still think of us as the underdogs even though we’re working our way up to be division champs.”
A win against host Westmoor on Wednesday night will give Oceana at least a co-title with South San Francisco. A Shark victory against the Rams and a South City loss to visiting rival El Camino on Thursday night would give Oceana an outright league title – its first since 2009-2010 under former coach James Endo.
“I’m actually really proud of my team for getting that far, for tying for first,” the soft-spoken Margate said.
Clark senses the lack of respect, which is partially understandable because Oceana has not done much in recent years. Before last season’s 14-10 record, the Sharks hadn’t had a winning record since Endo’s team went 15-7 in 2009-2010.
“They definitely underestimate us,” Clark said. “Probably out of all the teams in the PAL we don’t get a whole lot of respect. We’re a small school and we’re right in the middle of Westmoor and Terra Nova and most of the girls go to one of those two schools, so we don’t get a lot of girls with basketball experience. I’m just lucky right now because we have a good starting five – a good core.”
Oceana’s Holden Lai shares athletic director duties with Mike Tang. They preside over a modest athletic program that consists of six sports for guys and four for the girls. Archbishop Mitty, this is not. But the pride is apparent at the often fog-shrouded school at the base of Milagra Ridge.
“Pacifica athletes tend to go to Terra Nova because it has more sports available,” Lai said. “So the success of our girls basketball team is a big thing for the school and the program. We’re excited and we hope they can go pretty far in the PAL tournament and even in CCS. We could not be any more proud of them.”
John Murphy is the Web Content Manager of Prep2Prep. Reach him at jmurphy@prep2prep.com and follow on Twitter @PrepCat
