Royal's 'road warriors' bow out at home
Second-round playoff loss ends remarkable season
By Steve Ames Special to The Acorn

BILL SPARKES/Acorn Newspapers TRAPPED- Royal's Rose Liov, left, tries to get off a shot against Bishop's 33 Michelle Franco at home Wednesday. RHS lost 60-36.

While pleased to be back home on their own gymnasium floor once again- after a season with all but one other game on the road- Royal High's girl's basketball team met a foe it could not fell in the playoffs and now must wait till next season to play again.

Playing in the second round of the CIFSouthern Section Division I-AA playoffs Wednesday night, the Highlanders lost to the Bishop Amat Lancers of La Puente, 6036. In the Highlanders' only other home game on Feb. 9, played after the new gym floor was completed, Royal beat the Simi Valley Pioneers 43-41.

For the Highlanders, junior point guard Erika Ward and junior forward Kris King scored nine points apiece, and junior forward Rose Lioy got eight points.

The visitors' junior guard Kristen McCarthy scored 19 points, and senior forward Michelle Franco dropped in 10. Senior forward Candice Brown had nine points and junior forward Ashleigh Adams added eight points for Bishop Amat.

The Highlanders were ahead 10 30 seconds into the first quarter on senior guard Jen Mosier's free throw. But that was Royal's last lead of the game.

Bishop Amat held a 15-point bulge, 28-13, at halftime. The Lancers were ahead 44-24 as the game went into the fourth quarter. RHS reduced Bishop Amat's margin to 16 points, 4832, midway through the fourth quarter, but the Lancers built the lead back to 24 points, 5834, with 36 seconds remaining and again to 24 for the game's final score.

Royal had won nine straight, the last loss to Newbury Park on Jan. 12, and finished the season with a 12-2 Marmonte League record and a share of the league title. RHS was 22-6 overall.

Head coach Mike Kohl said King was sick all week and didn't practice, and as a result the starting lineup changed.

"Our rule is you've got to practice or you can't play," he said. "I still played her because she came to school today (Wednesday). She wasn't herself. I didn't feel like we really performed like we're capable of."

Kohl said McCarthy "really did a good job" on Ward.

"Erika Ward is the heart of our team," he said. "She's played every significant minute all season. She's the finest conditioned athlete I've ever coached. Obviously it was their goal to disrupt her game, and they did a good job with that.

"I think that if we were to play them again and she would have had an opportunity to have a little more adjustment time, she would have a better understanding of what she would have to do to combat that."

Kohl said that the Highlanders haven't been pressed all year.

"The only time we press is at practice," he said. "It's not the same going against your second team as against a pretty good team that presses because they have pretty good athletes. I thought that had an impact on the game, too. We really don't have a lot of depth this year."

On balance, Kohl said, "We can't overcome everything," adding that Royal played 25-straight road games. "We won our league against all odds. We have practiced more at different gyms than we have in our own gym, and we come in here tonight and it's a big game like this and it's really difficult to come into a big game in your own house when you really haven't practiced here."

From the beginning of November through early February, while the new floor was being installed, the Highlanders practiced at Sinaloa Middle School in Simi Valley and played "home" games at Moorpark High's old gym.

"I tried to make it our home away from home," Kohl said. "They have a little team room off to the side of the gym. I took our banners over there. I took our team pictures over there. I took some of our winning tournament trophies over there, cleaned it up because it was a mess.

"There were cobwebs. It was disgusting. I set the trophies down on a little altar by a white board that's hung upside down on the wall for whatever reason they have that. I put up the banners. I set chairs around and cleaned up all those cobwebs so when the girls first came in they saw a room," Kohl said.

Mosier initially was not pleased with the team being uprooted from the campus gym.

"We were kind of all mad," she said. "We wanted to play in our home gym as seniors."

Guards Val Cunningham and Vanessa Deleon are the two other seniors who were among the team's road warriors.

"It was tougher because it was a longer drive every day, but it wasn't too bad," Mosier said. "It didn't hurt us. I think honestly it made us stronger. We were kind of used to not playing in our house, not in our gym. When we had actual away games, we were used to playing away anyway."