Hansen's Top Teams, No. 59: No one could keep up with CDO's dominant girls basketball team in 1987

The genesis of Canyon del Oro’s undefeated 1987 girls basketball season began innocently, six years earlier in the gymnasium at Donaldson Elementary School.

CDO coach Dan Huff would periodically spend his lunch hour at Donaldson, coaching fifth- and sixth-graders who had shown interest in the game. Huff was thinking ahead; planting a seed about playing basketball at CDO.

“Sometimes it pays off,’’ Huff says now, 35 years after CDO went 28-0 to win the state’s big schools championship. “But little did I know that while I was running a boys clinic I would meet Nicole Smith, the only girl to attend those noon-time sessions.’’

In 1987, Smith became Arizona’s Gatorade Player of the Year, averaging 19 points per game, a three-year starter for Huff’s Dorados during a period they went 73-8.

“Nicole later told me she was inspired to play basketball by those clinics at her elementary school,’’ says Huff, who was from 1983-87, both the head coach of the CDO boys and girls basketball teams, a period in which girls basketball began in March. “She devoted her young life to basketball and took it to great heights.’’

Huff had been a basketball standout at Amphi, playing under Pima County Sports Hall of Fame coach George Genung, an all-city standout who earned two degrees at the UA before coaching the CDO girls to a 100-28 record in five years, and the Dorado boys team to 321 wins in 20 years.

There may be no such thing as “right time, right place’’ in basketball coaching, but in the mid ’80s, CDO’s girls basketball team was a right-time, right-place job.

The team not only included Smith, but Dana Nymeyer, daughter of former Arizona career leading scorer Ed Nymeyer, who had coached Flowing Wells High School to a boys state basketball championship in 1968, as well as Shelli Riley, a strong contributor who is the mother of former Arizona and BYU point guard Alex Barcello, now playing in the NBA Summer League for the Toronto Raptors.

“It was a good place to be a basketball coach,’’ says Huff. “Jodi Hildebrandt was an all-city player. Stacy Hopkins, Heather Conway and Kristen Smith were just excellent players. I never had a problem with egos, there were no parental complaints. At some point, due to injuries, we were down to seven players. It all just flowed.’’

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CDO’s ’87 Class 5A state champs won by an average of 31 points per game.

Huff learned from the most prominent coaches in Tucson prep history: Genung, Nymeyer, Tucson High’s Ollie Mayfield, Rincon’s Dick King, CDO’s John Tissaw and Dean Metz and Sahuaro’s Dick McConnell. He listened and learned and once he was hired at CDO, the Dorados benefitted.

“I felt like I got paid for having fun,’’ Huff says. “I couldn’t wait to go to school and get in the classroom.’’

Before a young Nicole Smith showed up at Donaldson Elementary to meet the man who would be her coach, Huff did the same thing a generation earlier as a student at Prince Junior High School. He would walk to Amphi to watch Genung’s teams practice and play.

It wasn’t that Huff’s CDO girls teams didn’t encounter difficulty. In the 1985 state championship game, the Dorados lost 47-45 on a buzzer-beating shot at Phoenix South Mountain. That loss stung. It wasn’t erased for two years.

Finally, at the start of the 1987 season, CDO got off to an 8-0 start.

“I knew we were going to have a pretty good team, we were beating everybody decisively,’’ says Huff. “One day Pat Derksen, my assistant coach, told me ‘Nobody is beating the Dorados this year.’ I didn’t say much about that, going undefeated isn’t what you expect; there’s always a bump in the road.

“But that year we won the state championship game 69-55. There were no bumps in the road.’’

After her days at CDO, Smith accepted a scholarship to Nevada and became a four-year letter-winner. She is now a kinesiology professor at Fresno State. Riley played at Yavapai College; in addition to her son, Alex, who helped Corona del Sol win two state championships, her three daughters, Julia, Amanda and Sarah, all became part of state championship teams at Chandler Seton Catholic.