Napa cruises past American Canyon, clinches first league title since 1991
By Kyle Foster
Twitter: @NapaKyle @NapaSportsNews
Can you say playoff bound?
The Napa High boys basketball team now can after beating second-place American Canyon 73-57 on Wednesday night to clinch the programs first league title since 1991. It’s also the first time Napa will be in the playoffs since 2005.
Napa coach Zack Cook was pretty happy afterward to clinch the title against their closest competitor in the Vine Valley Athletic League.
“It’s great,” he said while trying to hold back tears of joy. “It’s awesome. I’m still in shock.”
It’s pretty surreal for Napa senior guard Stephen Blume to win a league title, especially in his senior year.
“That’s awesome,” Blume said of winning a league title in his senior season. “We’ve been dreaming of this since our freshman year, so that’s pretty cool. And to do it with Vince (O’Kelley) and Zach (Swim) who’s been on the team since freshman year that’s pretty awesome. And to see the young guys get it so early and hopefully they get it even more going forward.”
The league title is only the fourth in school’s 120-year history.
The Grizzlies (19-5 overall, 10-0 VVAL) led wire-to-wire in this contest, but their big lead was gained in the first half.
In the first minute and a half of the game Napa began the game on a 7-0 run.
Oh, and it also helped that Blume had 22 of his 28 points on the night in the first half alone.
“It was kinda one of those nights,” Blume said. “I kinda just shot it and it went in, so that was pretty cool. But the team really did help by getting me open. We ran a couple plays (designed) by Cook that just helped me get open back cuts and stuff like that and them just finding me was really helpful.”
Brayden Greenlee also had eight of his 10 points in the first quarter, which also helped.
Napa also went 14-for-23 from the field and 7-for-8 from beyond the arc in the first half.
Meanwhile, Swim scored 12 points on the night to form a three-headed monster for the Wolves (12-13, 7-4 VVAL) to defend against.
With the league title in hand the final two league games for Napa are meaningless, but that doesn’t mean Napa is going to let up at all with the VVAL tournament coming up next week and then the CIF North Coast Section division one playoffs starting the following week.
“We’re just going to try to keep getting better for playoffs,” Blume said of what the plan is going forward. “That’s our next goal, to try and win in playoffs, so we’re just going to keep working up to that and to see who we get in playoffs.”
“Just try to keep winning and keep adding wins to our total, and give ourselves the best chance at getting a good playoff seed,” Cook explained. “We just want to be playing well when we do get to the playoffs.”
Napa will return to action on Friday night at 7 p.m. when they visit Petaluma. As for American Canyon, they’ll host Sonoma Valley on Friday night at 7 p.m.
