Things are heating up in FVC Valley race
It's an important weekend for title contender Dundee-Crown (11-6, 4-0) in the Fox Valley Conference's Valley Division.
D-C coach Lance Huber said his players must focus on Friday's game at Cary-Grove (4-14, 1-3) before turning their attention to Saturday's rematch against visiting defending Valley Division champion Huntley (16-2, 5-0).
Huber, whose team has won 5 straight, has reason to be concerned. Elroy Fitzgerald Gymnasium has not been kind to Dundee-Crown. The Trojans have defeated D-C in Cary three of the last four years.
"They always give us trouble," Huber said. "They're not going to make mistakes. They're going to guard you and run their stuff well. We're going to have execute well against those guys. Like always, they're really big with long arms. We're really small except for one guy (6-foot-6 Brandon Gordon). It's going to be really difficult for us.
"Everybody's going to talk about the Huntley-Dundee-Crown game, but the Huntley-Dundee-Crown game doesn't mean anything unless Dundee-Crown takes care of business against Cary-Grove."
If the Chargers escape Cary with a victory, it would set up a Saturday showdown between first-place teams with identical 5-0 records atop the FVC Valley.
Huntley defeated Dundee-Crown 54-49 in the championship game of the Sycamore Thanksgiving Tournament on Nov. 26.
The teams will meet for a third time in division play in Huntley on Feb. 11. They could clash for a fourth time in the postseason. Both are preassigned to the Class 4A Huntley regional.
Assigned seats: The IHSA predetermines regional assignments within any sectional complex involving high schools from Chicago's collar counties and Rockford-area schools.
The policy, adopted for geographical reasons when the IHSA expanded from two to four classes in 2007-08, has created unbalanced competition within sectionals involving Fox Valley area schools since its inception. The upcoming Class 4A Dundee-Crown boys basketball sectional is yet another example.
Of the fields at the four regional sites within the D-C sectional Rockford Auburn, Huntley, St. Charles North and Cary-Grove the latter sticks out like a sore thumb because it lacks a team with a winning record.
In fact, the combined record of the five teams preassigned to the Cary-Grove regional, which includes the host Trojans, Crystal Lake South, Prairie Ridge, Jacobs and McHenry, is 23-67. That's a winning percentage of .230. McHenry (7-9) owns the best record in the field.
Because five of the least successful teams in the sectional are grouped at Cary-Grove, the other three regional fields are uniformly tougher than they would otherwise be under the traditional seeding structure. The toughest regional by winning percentage is Auburn (.632), followed by Huntley (.604) and St. Charles North (.517).
Crystal Lake South suffered from the predetermined regional policy in 2010, but the same program could benefit this time around.
CL South coach Dan DeBruycker had one of his strongest teams in 2010, when the Gators entered the postseason with a record of 15-11. They had the misfortune that season of being grouped with McHenry (16-8), Huntley (15-12) and Rockford Jefferson (21-7).
"All the sudden Jefferson comes over to our place and we have to play them in the regional final," DeBruycker recalled this week. "Now we have one of the worst records we've had (4-13), and we have a great chance. We'll see what happens."
Of the Gators' 4 wins, 3 were notched against teams in the Cary-Grove regional. They defeated Jacobs (4-15), Cary-Grove (4-14) and Prairie Ridge (4-15).
Big Northern, big game: First place in the Big Northern Conference-East is on the line when Richmond-Burton (8-9, 4-0) hosts Burlington Central (11-8, 3-1) tonight at 7 p.m.
Central's Rockets return from a 10-day layoff to challenge Richmond-Burton's 1-2-2 defense.
"They get into that defense off makes, misses, dead balls, full court, three-quarter court whatever," Central coach Brett Porto explained. "They run it all the time and they're good at it. They rotate well and recover well out of it. How we execute against it will be a key to the game.
"And we have to defend," Porto added. "We'll be OK if we can provide good ball pressure like the last two games we played and cause some trouble in their half-court offense."
Burlington Central owns a 3-game winning streak. Richmond-Burton has won 8 of 11 since its 0-6 start.