Benefield: Cardinal Newman girls basketball team ready to take on state's best

By any measure, it's a good problem to have.

A CIF Division 4 basketball championship trophy in the lobby of your gymnasium and every starter from that squad of one season ago out on the floor practicing for this season.

But it also brings to the fore a pressure to repeat, or even, if you are the Cardinal Newman girls basketball team, to do one better.

“There was so much festivity about what happened last year that it was really important for us to - I don't want to say forget about it, because you are never going to forget - but focus on how can we get better as a team,” coach Monica Mertle said. “We are trying not to waste a season getting excited about what we once did.”

So with a playoff structure still in flux, Mertle is pressing her team to focus on the things in their control: work rate, effort, improvement.

With the addition of two athletic freshmen as well as a junior transfer from Piner High, Arie Searcy, the Cardinals seemingly have more talent on their 11-player roster that went 31-5 and 14-0 in the North Bay League last year.

Junior guard Tal Webb calls it big pressure. But good pressure.

The reigning All-Empire Large Schools Player of the Year, senior Hailey Vice-Neat, said they'll surprise no one this season. A reigning state championship squad doesn't enter a contest quietly. She says that trophy in the glass display case in the Cardinal Newman lobby puts a target on their backs.

“Everyone else that we play now is going to play 10 times harder,” she said.

Mertle, a devotee of a brutal preseason schedule, plans to be ready.

Last season, no NBL team came within 30 points of the Cardinals in league play, so Mertle slotted in tough out-of-league games into the midseason schedule. She did the same thing this year, in addition to scheduling games with three of the six reigning state championship teams.

“Our preseason schedule is so hard because they don't have time to celebrate last year or they won't win games this season,” she said.

Make no mistake, Cardinal Newman wants to win. Just what they want to win remains unclear. And that isn't entirely their fault.

Last year the Cardinals lost in the Division 4 North Coast Section final, 64-47, to a loaded Salesian Prep squad. Salesian was then pulled into the Open Division of the CIF state tournament, where it was seeded sixth and lost to eventual runner-up Miramonte in a region semifinal.

Newman, the No. 2 seed in NCS, remained in Division 4 and won its next four games, including a 39-37 nailbiter against Antelope Valley to win the state title. The only way to better last year's run is to play in the Open Division or a division higher than Division 4. But that's not up to them. So they just have to play and prove their worth against talented opponents.

Getting called up to the Open Division is an honor and a bit of a burden. It's the best teams, no matter the division. But one need look no further than Salesian last season to see how a talented team that dominated its own division fell in the mighty open division.

Mertle doesn't see it that way. You have to play the best to be considered among the best.

But just how those tournament selections will shake out this year remains unclear. Will the selections follow divisions or look more like they did in football this season, where state tournament pairings were based on “competitive equity” in order to create matchups that would feature the most competitive contests.

It's unclear.

So Mertle hammers home this message to her charges: all they can do is focus on their own preparations for whatever may come their way.

“It's not just us. The variables include other teams,” she said. “We can control our effort and we can control our desire to improve.”

“I think it makes us more process oriented and in a way it makes us focus on things we can directly control and encourages improvement,” she said. “In that sense it's been a great motivation.”

Vice-Neat sounded like she needed no motivation when asked her goal this season.

“The ultimate goal is to improve upon the state championship - in the Open,” she said. “That's the only way you can improve from last year.”

I wondered if it was hard to be motivated knowing the best the team can do is the same thing it did last year. The expectations are certainly there - after all, they have the same lineup.

“Playing the best players in the state, you can be champs of your division, but there's still better teams out there,” she said.

That's what the open division represents - the “out there,” the wider world beyond Sonoma County, beyond North Coast Section, even beyond Division 4.

“In some (way), it's not up to us,” Vice-Neat said. “We just play as hard as we can through this season and the section decides if we get pulled up or not.”

As hard as they can against the hardest teams they can find. Mertle has done her part there.

Webb, the junior guard, tries to keep the math simple.

“It's definitely a goal of ours - state or Open, but really, it's win every game until we are done,” she said.

As simple as that.

You can reach staff columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com, on Twitter @benefield and on Instagram at kerry.benefield. Podcasting on iTunes “Overtime with Kerry Benefield.”