SGV/Whittier Prep Sports Zone: Escarcega on Preps: When it comes to basketball rivalries, La Habra vs. Sonora deserves to be at the top
Both schools help deliver a quality product on the court and in the student sections.
Friday night’s action between Sonora and La Habra in front of a standing room only crowd. (Escarcega)
LA HABRA - When people find out that I write about prep sports, the first thing they ask me is if people are still going to games today as they did when they were in high school.
My answer is still the same – you bet! And if you need any evidence of it, all you had to do was attend last Friday’s Freeway League basketball game featuring Sonora taking on host La Habra.
When I first attended this game back in 2019, I was told that I needed to get to La Habra High School by 5:30. If you didn’t, you might not be able to get in. I took it with a grain of salt. After all, if I can get in to watch Muir vs. Pasadena at Muir High School, I can get in this gym.
When I arrived at 5:45 and saw that there was not a seat available ANYWHERE in the gym, my face turned blue. Thank goodness for the Athletic Director at the school, who told me that I had a seat at the scorer’s table but also told me that “If you hadn’t had your CIF card, you’d be on the outside looking in.”
Message received.
When I attended this year’s game, I got to the school at 5 p.m. (30 minutes before the girls varsity game) and I saw the gym was 75% filled FOR A JV GAME.
Sonora vs. La Habra is a throwback to the years when high school sports was the only game in town and if you wanted to know the score, you had to attend the game. Back in the day, there was no Twitter, no Instagram, and no Facebook. You could throw the records out the window because of the emotion of the game and the fact that both teams had this game circled on the schedule.
Yes, times have changed. It’s easier to promote this game thanks to social media. If you didn’t have a ticket to the standing-room-only event, you could watch the game live on NFHS Network, (the bad news is that it’s behind a paywall). Or you could keep track of the game on Twitter with the help of HS reporters (like yours truly and David Delgado, who covered the game for the Orange County Register) with updates and live stats.
But that didn’t slow down the number of students and fans that attended the game. When Delgado arrived at 5:30 for the girls varsity game, his first words to me were, “I didn’t know the entire city of La Habra goes to this game.” No David, it just seems that way.
Halfway through the girls varsity game, the PA announcer made a plea for fans to scoot him “and get to know each other very well. We still have quite a few students and fans that want to get into the gym.”
Not many basketball games in the area have that type of message. Oh and speaking of the girls varsity games, that has taken a turn for the better. When I attended the game in 2019, the La Habra girls basketball didn’t look bad… they looked horrible. I remember the halftime score of the game being something like 48-10. As the saying went back in the day, “you had to slog your way through the girls game to get to the good stuff.”
Within the four seasons of when I was last at the rivalry, something interesting has happened – La Habra has gotten a lot better. What used to be an easy “W” for Sonora is far from it and it was on display Friday night.
It was La Habra that was hustling for the loose balls and making the clutch baskets. Early in the third quarter, it was the Highlanders that had a 29-25 lead with Sonora fans feeling a bit uncomfortable. It helped that Larissa Robles, one of the top guards in the area, had to sit out the second quarter due to foul trouble.
It was until the early stages of the fourth quarter that Sonora fans could sit back and relax as the Raiders went on a 9-0 run that cemented a 57-47 victory. It didn’t stop La Habra coach Jet Julian to have a Chester smile on his face while saying, “We almost had them.” And if his job was to put Sonora on notice that they were no longer the easy “W” as they once were, the message was received loud and clear.
“We knew that they were going to be super tough,” veteran Sonora girls coach (and St. Paul HS alum) Melissa Barajas said. “Obviously they’ve been playing really well – they took Sunny Hills to overtime. They’ve been really competitive, they have people with a lot more experience over the years, and the new coach is doing a great job. We knew that they were going to be super tough.”
And while being competitive might sound like progress to a program like La Habra, when you are surrounded by other programs like football, boys basketball, baseball, and softball that win consistently and have the hardware to show it, the only way for a program to show progress is with wins. Will that happen in a couple of weeks when both teams meet up again in the vastness that is the Sonora gym, time will tell. But, one thing that was obvious at the end of the game, La Habra is no longer the easy W.
As good as the atmosphere was for the girls, it increased to another level when the boys got to the court. It was the feeling of many basketball insiders that both teams are similar from a talent point of view. For Sonora their big player is Yanmike “Yoda” Oke, a 6-foot, 6-inch forward that is a rim protector with his long arms and can shoot behind the 3-point arc. For La Habra, it was prolific shooting guard Grayson Sinek, a 6-foot-1 sophomore who can score from any spot on the court.
After an introduction that featured a spotlight setting for La Habra, the game started slowly as both teams were feeling each other out. That was not the case with the student sections as the interaction was just as entertaining as the action on the court. When the Raiders offense got going in the third quarter with a 12-3 run for a 38-32 lead, the Raiders student section chanted “Why so quiet?” to the La Habra HS student section.
As a point of reference, I’ve heard student sections in the Trinity and Mission League and I must admit, that chant was pretty clever.
In the end, it was too much Oke (15 points, 14 rebounds) and Troy Jenkins (17 points) as the Raiders came away with a 58-42 win. La Habra was led by Jaedon Anderson with 12 points, but Sinek could only score seven points against a Sonora defense that asked Oke to guard him the entire game.
At the end of the evening, the only thing that both coaches wanted to talk about was the atmosphere inside a game that reminded everyone of a game in a small town in Indiana.
“I’ve been at Sonora for 33 years and for 33 years, this rivalry has been crazy,” Sonora coach Mike Murphy said. “The entire town comes to this game. (La Habra) coaching staff has done a great job of turning the program around. It’s always a competitive game and its game that the players love to play in. They all know each other and it’s a healthy rivalry.”
La Habra coach Aaron Riekenberg understands how important this game is to the community.
“It's an incredible community,” Riekenberg said. “I’m so proud to be a part of it. It’s a small-town feel to a big city. Credit to coach Murphy, his program is the staple. We have such a young group; I was excited to see what they would do in this environment. Honestly, they did a heck of a job.”
And so did everyone from both schools in showing a stranger that high school sports are alive and well. If you have a chance to experience a La Habra vs. Sonora basketball, by all means do it. You will come away feeling great about the state of high school basketball in Southern California.
Even if it means showing up at 5:00.