Cloverdale girls declined mistaken NorCal basketball invite

In a bizarre situation, the Cloverdale High School administration and coach of the Eagles’ girls basketball team originally decided not to apply as an at-large team for the CIF Division V NorCal region tournament, only to have the Eagles somehow selected to the tournament - forcing the school to ultimately decide to decline to participate.

“It’s a bad situation. Personally, I’m not happy with how it went down,” coach Rick Berry said. “But I told the team, let’s not let this separate us from the good things we have done this season.”

It all started after Cloverdale lost in the North Coast Section Division 5 quarterfinal game to Clear Lake on Feb. 24. Berry and the Cloverdale administration decided they didn’t want to wait eight days to hear if they were an at-large selection to the NorCal tournament. There were also other issues that led to the decision that Berry did not want to detail on the record. In Berry’s and his players’ minds, the season was over with a record of 20-7, a North Central League I ?co-championship with Clear Lake and a decent NCS showing.

“We looked at the whole situation and there were underlying issues at the time that made it best to not go to NorCal,” Berry said. “I feel bad that this transpired. … It was a mess.”

Having decided not to attend, Berry and the Cloverdale administration were surprised to get a call on March 4 from an NCS administrator saying the Eagles were in fact selected as an at-large team in Division V and scheduled for a first-round game at Lassen.

Berry said that as far as he knows, nobody from Cloverdale put in a request to be selected for the tournament.

“The NCS said that it was a phone call from someone from Cloverdale High (requesting consideration for an at-large bid),” Berry said. “NCS said that they didn’t know who it was. I know that our athletic director, principal and I did not call NCS. We didn’t know who applied.”

Once word got out about the development, there was debate and disagreement among school officials, players’ parents and the community as to whether the school should accept the bid.

“The situation created tension with some people. It made for some drama for us in the community because some people wanted us to go,” Berry said. “Feelings got hurt and people overreacted.”

Berry said the players were mixed about wanting to participate.

“Some of the players did not want to pursue it,” said Berry, who met with the team to discuss the surprise at-large bid. “(But) the kids never made a big deal about it to me.”

Fallout from the incident has led to a change of policy by the Cloverdale administration, which decided that unless a Cloverdale team automatically qualifies for a NorCal tournment by advancing to the semifinal round of the NCS playoffs, the school will not send teams to NorCal. In other words, at-large bids for NorCal will not be considered or applied for by Cloverdale’s administration.

Berry is left to consider “what-if” scenarios if the Eagles had gone to NorCal after all.

“If I had to do it all over again, I would have just said we are going and that’s that. I would have said we made a commitment and we should go,” Berry said. “We could have gone to NorCal and competed. We could have played with anybody. We had a good enough team to win.”

The Eagles will never know whether Berry’s premonition would have come true.