PALO ALTO — If anyone knows about a rivalry, it’s a senior.
For the Palo Alto girls basketball team, there’s only one. It’s 5-foot-9 guard Carly Leong,
“Oh, man, as a leader, especially for this team, I just want to pass the ball and make sure everyone gets to touch the ball because I know how important it is to play in these rivalry games,” Leong said. “I’m sure the freshmen are really psyched about this.”
That’s definitely true of point guard Annika Shah, who helped spark a 16-0 run to open the game against crosstown rival Gunn.
The end result was a 64-35 rout on Saturday in which both Leong and Shah barely left the bench after netting 17 and 24 points, respectively.
Where exactly did this freshman come out of?
“She came from Jordan Middle School and she’s huge for our team,” Leong said of her teammate — .Shah “She takes a lot of the pressure off my back that I had at the beginning of the season. She’s amazing.”
“She’ll take the big shot,” Paly coach Scott Peters said. “Her and Carly, it’s nice to have them together.”
The Paly boys basketball team is not lacking for seniors — it has eight.
One of them, Max Dorward, tried to put an exclamation point on the 56-40 victory over Gunn in front of a raucous crowd with a slam dunk on a breakaway that he created with a block midway through the fourth quarter.
“I ran down the entire court and it was kind of late in the game, so I was a little tired and my leg gave out,” Dorward said. “But I definitely tried.”
If there’s a reason to try, the Paly-Gunn rivalry is as good as any.
“The Gunn-Paly games are always crazy,” Dorward said. “We always get huge crowds and they always come out playing really hard, a lot of ball pressure and we just gotta handle it. I thought we played OK, definit4ely could’ve played better, but we got the job done.”
On the boys’ side, the Vikings (12-2) participated in a nonleague affair in the Santa Clara Valley Athletic League.
Gunn (5-8) got a game-high 15 points from 6-1 senior Eli Russo, who sank a trio of 3-pointers, but it wasn’t enough to keep pace.
Paly got 13 points apiece from both Dorward and center Bryant Jefferson, while fellow senior Spencer Rojahn overcame foul trouble to contribute 11 points, nailing three shots from beyond the arc.
“We can look to anybody,” Dorward said. “One night it might be me, one night it might be (Will) Schlemmer, one night it be Spencer, another night is Jared (Wulbrun). You never know with us and we’re very unselfish players, so we love it when somebody else has a great game and we always look to find somebody else.”
It’s different to the girls’ side at Paly (10-5, 4-0 SCVAL De Anza), which has two freshmen, a sophomore and junior Elle Jeffries in the starting lineup.
“They’ve done a good job of working with each other,” Peters said. “It was a little bit of a struggle at the start just because of the new personnel, it was kind of a new way to doing things. But our leaders have stepped up, Carly and Ellie, and really helped the girls a lot.”
The overwhelming 39-14 advantage at halftime, which included a 10-0 singular run by Shah in the first quarter, allowed Paly to empty its bench in the second half in order to get 11 players in the scoring column.
The live reps for underclassmen is part of the growth process for the Vikings.
“We’re definitely trying to find our identity this year,” Leong said. “As each game goes, though, we’re improving every single game, so it’s great.”
“Especially when there’s a crowd for a Gunn-Paly game,” Peters said. “For them to get in and play and be a part of arguably our biggest crowd of the year, it’s really fun.”
