Hansen's Sunday Notbeook: Motivated by AIA's slight, Sunnyside wins state title

Casey O'Brien continues to prove his value on the soccer field

The coaching matchup in Wednesday’s Class 5A state boys soccer championship game almost didn’t seem fair.

No. 2 Gilbert Campo Verde, 24-1-1, the defending state champion, would be playing close to home in Scottsdale. It is coached by Drew Guarneri, winner of last year’s 5A boys state title and one of Arizona’s most accomplished soccer names.

There’s more: Guarneri also coached Campo Verde’s girls team to the 5A state title. He is also the head coach of Mesa College’s women’s soccer team and head coach of the Arizona Arsenal Soccer Club.

But even Guarneri’s resume didn’t awe Sunnyside’s third-year coach Casey O’Brien, whose background is in basketball.

“That’s why I came to the UA and got my degree here,” he said with a laugh. “I wanted to go to a basketball-centric school.”

That soon changed.

O’Brien and the No. 1 Blue Devils had considerable motivation when the oft-bungling AIA forced them to drive to Scottsdale for the championship game.

“I made quite a big case out of it,” said O’Brien, who grew up in San Diego. “It had been spelled out for quite some time that we would play at Mountain View, and I thought the AIA did us wrong by making us to go Scottsdale. It was absolutely not the way to do things; it was quite a mess.”

O’Brien contacted all the Tucson schools with artificial turf and asked about the possibility of staging the 5A championship game. Marana High School told him it was good to go but the AIA didn’t make a move.

The Blue Devils didn’t need much motivation. They blew out Campo Verde 4-0, finishing the season 24-0-2. It capped a remarkable three-year run in which O’Brien has coached Sunnyside to a 59-10-5 record.

His leading scorer and likely Arizona Player of the Year, senior Manny Quiroz, scored 39 goals. That’s astonishing. More astonishing: Because of family issues, Quiroz had left the Sunnyside program three years ago to play at Tucson High School. He returned to Sunnyside for his final two seasons, and scored 61 goals.

Fellow senior Adrian Virgen, who scored 22 goals this year, had spent the last two seasons living in Casa Grande, playing in the developmental system of Real Salt Lake.

But it all came together this season as the Blue Devils won their first-ever boys state soccer championship, a run which included being ranked No. 1 in the nation at times.

O’Brien, who had never coached soccer before graduating from Arizona, began his post-UA days as a teacher at Summit View Elementary School.

“Basketball, track and volleyball were my sports, but when I got to Summit View they all wanted to play soccer and they had no one to coach them. I said, ‘let’s do this’ and started to learn about soccer. It was hard; soccer is a very intricate game.”

O’Brien soon joined the Blue Devil faculty on the urging of Richard Sanchez, the legendary Sunnyside state championship football and wrestling coach. O’Brien assisted varsity soccer coach Philip English and then took charge in 2017.

When this season began, the Blue Devils’ goals were clear.

“From Day 1, our goal was to go undefeated and win the state championship,” O’Brien said. “They deserve all the credit, but that’s just half of the job. The real work starts Monday when we start working on getting our kids to college.”

Even in a down year, Arizona remains a big target

After Arizona lost at CU Events Center last week, Colorado coach Tad Boyle walked into the media room and spoke as a conquering hero.

“We took Arizona’s best shot,” he said, and then went on and on, telling CU fans he will next work on beating Arizona at McKale Center.

Earth to Boyle: Arizona doesn’t have a best shot this year.

The differences between basketball at Arizona and Colorado are pronounced. Immediately adjacent to the CU Events Center is a four-story parking garage similar to the Cherry Garage at McKale Center. At CU, parking is free. At Arizona, even in a historically bad year, it’s $15 to park close to McKale.

Boyle just received a $380,000-a-year raise and a contract rollover through 2022-23. That’s nuts: Colorado’s coach has gone 40-46 in Pac-12 games the last five seasons and has played in just one NCAA Tournament game, a loss.

But beating Arizona is a big deal, even when the Wildcats lose seven straight games. Perhaps that’s why Boyle felt compelled to say “this was another great victory by the Buffaloes tonight.”

Sean Miller and the Wildcats will carry the same target on a trip to Oregon State and Oregon this week. Consider this is the Payback Tour.

This isn’t new turf for Miller. As a young assistant coach at Pitt in 1995-96, Miller was part of a team that lost seven consecutive games as part of a 1-12 slide.

But that was different. Those losses were on the ledger of Pitt head coach Ralph Willard, and many of them came against the game’s Big East Conference giants: No. 1 UMass, No. 4 Villanova, No. 5 Georgetown and No. 15 Syracuse.

A bad team could get swallowed up and forgotten in those days. This Arizona team can’t hide.

Salpointe coach Wolfgang Weber orchestrated 'magical ride'

Salpointe Catholic boys soccer coach Wolfgang Weber won his seventh state championship last week, which equals the number of championships won by former Catalina Foothills girls coach Charlie Kendrick. “The beginning was a little bumpy,” Weber said, “but once we got on this path of continuous improvement it became a magical ride.” Weber’s Lancers outscored their four playoff opponents 21-2 to leave no doubt. Weber now has 671 victories in 37 years at Salpointe; no one in Arizona prep history is within 300 wins of that total. What’s amazing is that Weber has survived two near-fatal heart attacks along the way and, in his early 70s, seems to keep getting better.

Miller, Olson uncontested when it comes to recruiting

Before Mark Phelps was hired to be part of Arizona’s basketball coaching staff, he was the head coach at Drake. He lost that job after going 77-86 in five years, and then reunited with Sean Miler, his former colleague on Herb Sendek's staff at North Carolina State. Phelps was clearly a diligent recruiter before he was fired from the UA staff, but he was not the No. 1 recruiter at Arizona, nor was among the nation’s top-recruiting assistant coaches. That was and always will be Miller. Lute Olson employed three elite-level recruiters — Jessie Evans, Ken Burmeister and Josh Pastner — but it would also be an error to say any of those men were the No. 1 recruiters at Arizona. Once Olson walked into a room, as with Miller now, not much else mattered.

Arizona coaching tree needs some water

Among five Division I head basketball coaches from Arizona, Damon Stoudamire is now 38-55 in three seasons at Pacific; Jack Murphy is 77-145 in his seventh year at NAU; Jason Gardner is 63-90 in his fifth year at IUPUI; and Pastner continues to struggle to make Georgia Tech relevant, 46-50 at that school in three seasons. Russ Pennell, an interim coach who led Arizona the 2009 Sweet 16, is 45-105 in five years at Central Arkansas.

Bibby might be best suited for high school gig

The one reason I don’t expect to see UA basketball legend Mike Bibby become an assistant college basketball coach is because it’s all about recruiting. That wouldn’t be his strength nor his personality. Even though he has coached Phoenix’s Shadow Mountain High School to multiple Class 4A state championships, Bibby stays mostly to himself — a lot like his dad, Henry Bibby, a former UCLA star and USC head coach. I would enjoy seeing Mike Bibby and his Shadow Mountain powerhouse teams move into an Open Division, which would give other 4A teams a reasonable chance to win the state championship. To me, the best era of high school basketball in this state was the 1990s. Nine teams won 4A state titles between 1991-2000, including Paul Dull’s 1992 Cholla club, Dwight Rees’ 1993 unbeaten Sunnyside team, Jim Ferguson’s 1999 Santa Rita team and Dick McConnell’s 2000 Sahuaro club. No recruiting, no transferring, no open enrollment. It was neighborhood basketball — and it was so much better than the current revolving-door system of prep basketball at the top.

Tucson Rodeo continues to be one of the nation's best

The ongoing Tucson Rodeo continues to be ranked as one of the 25 leading PRCA events, which is impressive considering there are 668 sanctioned PRCA rodeos this year. Tucson Rodeo general manager Gary Williams likes to say that it’s the top outdoor rodeo of the non-summer season, and shouldn’t be compared to its winter competition such as the San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo and the vast Rodeo Houston. Both of those events are staged in NBA/NFL arenas and draw more than 200,000 per year. No mud, muck and snow there, but to me that’s the appeal of La Fiesta de los Vaqueros. It has the look, smell and feel of an old-time cowboy rodeo.

Tucsonan among those hoping to qualify for Cologuard Classic

Among those scheduled to play at Oro Valley Country Club in Monday’s qualifier for the Cologuard Classic are former PGA Tour champions Ronnie Black of Tucson, Jay Don Blake and Keith Clearwater. A pre-qualifier was held last week on a windy day at Randolph North and it included UA associate athletic director Mike Ketcham, who was John Daly's long-ago teammate at Arkansas. Ketcham, former head golf coach at Oregon State, didn’t get one of the five spots in Monday’s qualifier mostly because his duties at the UA prevent him from playing golf regularly. I long thought Daly would win frequently on the PGA Champions Tour but that hasn’t happened. He won once in 2017 and this year didn’t even qualify for the Cologuard Classic, but was granted a sponsor’s exemption by the Tucson Conquistadores.

Freshmen finding that college softball comes with adjustments

The move to the highest levels of NCAA softball can be imposing, and UA coach Mike Candrea has discovered that again this season. Arizona’s top recruit, freshman pitcher-hitter Marissa Schuld, has thus far pitched just six innings and had two at-bats. She was Arizona’s player of the year at Phoenix’s Pinnacle High School last year. UA freshman Izzy Pacho, an Ironwood Ridge grad who hit .650 as a high school senior, is 1 for 16 through Saturday’s games. The growth of women’s softball nationally has made it more and more difficult for freshmen to be productive. CDO grad Ellessa Bonstrom, a mainstay on coach Kelly Fowler’s powerful Dorados teams, starts as a freshman in right field for Utah but was hitting .214 through Friday. At CDO, Bonstrom hit a cumulative .469 over four seasons, with 30 home runs.

My two cents: High schools finding it hard to compete in 'wild, wild West'

The Arizona Interscholastic Association is consistently overwhelmed during the era of open enrollment, club sports and transfers in high school athletics.

It was tardy last week when it awkwardly eliminated Sabino’s heavily-favored girls basketball team from the ongoing Class 3A state tournament. It is Exhibit A that the AIA isn’t able to properly staff or police movement from team to team.

Former Sabino and Catalina Foothills state championship football coach Jeff Scurran said it best: “Who has the time or money to police this growing problem? It’s never-ending.’’

Ideally, much like the NCAA, each high school in Arizona would have a compliance officer to investigate new players, such as those that led to Sabino’s baseball team being stripped of a 2018 state championship and caused the Sabercats' 2018-19 girls basketball team to be declared ineligible.

Sunnyside state championship soccer coach Casey O’Brien has a good read on the situation.

“I don’t know if the money is going to be there to have compliance monitors at each school,’’ he said. “I can see it implemented at the big Phoenix schools in the next few years, and at schools like Salpointe and Catalina Foothills. At those schools without the resources, like the TUSD and Sunnyside, I don’t know.

“But we do need to be more diligent and take it more seriously. Kids are coming into high school from club teams for all sports. It’s like the wild, wild west out there.’’