Valley Christian High senior Chayse Chambers takes one of her 11 shots from beyond the three-point line last Friday against Maranatha High in the Olympic League opener. Chambers hit six three-pointers, accounting for all 18 points she scored as the Defenders rallied in the second half for a 44-33 victory. PHOTOS BY STEVE FERICEAN.
January 7, 2025
By Loren Kopff • @LorenKopff on X
Valley Christian High kicked off Olympic League action against Maranatha High last Friday and the girls proved that there is more to their team than up and coming shooting star sophomore Hannah Burgoyne. For the second straight game, senior Chayse Chambers shot the lights out of the gymnasium, further illustrating that opponents shouldn’t sleep on the rest of the team.
After collecting seven three-pointers and scoring 23 points on Dec. 30 against Norco High in the final contest of the Orange Holiday Classic, she was back at it against the Minutemen, shooting six of 11 from the field, all coming from beyond the arc, as she helped the Defenders pull away in the second half for a 44-33 victory. Entering the game, the last six wins by V.C. over Maranatha have been by a combined average of five and a half points.
“Chayse has just been shooting the ball incredible, and I think it’s obvious because teams are preparing for Hannah,” said V.C. head coach Dan Leffler. “They’re either going to face guard her or they’re going to double team her. So somebody’s got to shoot the ball and she’s been doing a great job for us. It makes us a little bit more difficult to prepare for, I think. But I think it’s what we need to be competitive for league. We need somebody else to shoot because Hannah’s a great player; she does a lot of wonderful things for us.”
V.C. trailed 7-2 before the first of those three-pointers from Chambers started a 9-0 run before the Minutemen scored the final five points over the last 1:56 of the stanza, then the first five points of the second quarter. Maranatha still had a 19-13 lead until Chambers fed a pass to junior Aniyah Peoples which began a 10-2 run that put the Defenders in front at the half. The go-ahead basket came with 22.3 seconds remaining in the half when Peoples scored off a pass from junior Liana Lopez.
Whatever Leffler said at halftime worked because the Defenders (8-9, 1-0) came out vigorously to begin the second half, allowing the Minutemen to shoot two of 16 from the field in the third quarter while building a 10-point advantage going into the fourth quarter. One reason for the strong third quarter was the defensive performance against Elizabeth Ekpo, who had nine points in the first half, but attempted two shots in the third quarter, scoring once and missing a pair of free throws.
“Effort on our part; I think that’s the big thing,” said Leffler of the third quarter. “We tend to play games pretty slow and finish strong, and we’ve been in a lot of games where we’ve been chasing. Again, we’re not used to being in those spots and now we’re trying to figure it out on the fly. Defensively, we tightened it up a little bit.”
Peoples began the fourth quarter with her last basket almost two minutes in to give the Defenders their biggest lead of the game. And while the hosts scored just eight points in the final stanza, the shooting of Burgoyne, Chambers and Peoples were more than the Minutemen could handle. Burgoyne and Peoples each scored 10 points on a combined nine of 20 from the field and had nine and eight rebounds, respectively.
Freshman Molly Douglas came off the bench to add the other six points V.C. would score and grabbed seven rebounds. As a team, V.C. was 17 of 41 from the field but 10 of 26 from three-point territory, and it did not go to the line once. All seven players who saw action had at least one rebound and one assist.
“We’re going to shoot it 25 times a game from three-point land,” said Leffler. “That’s our goal, and I think we shoot better from three than we do a two. And, we have to get better at finishing around the basket. I think we had opportunities that we did not finish around the basket that we need to get better at. But that’s kind of the makeup of our team. they want to play the perimeter and shoot the ball, and we work hard on it.”
Leffler’s team has reached the .500 mark once this season, which came after the second game, and has won four of its last six games while the V.C. boys squad was seeking a .500 mark for the second time in seven days and the first quarter would have suggested that the Defenders were on their way to that goal.
Valley Christian High junior Christian Wondimu drives around Chris Smith of Maranatha High last Friday in the Olympic League opener. Wondimu scored nine points and had five rebounds, but it was Smith’s 22 points that enabled Maranatha to a 61-51 victory.
They bolted out to a 15-6 lead in the first 4:35 before Maranatha went on a 22-2 run over the next 11:25 of the half and could not recover from that in a 61-49 loss. After 21 straight losses to the Minutemen, the two had split the last eight meetings.
“We started the game with energy, and I think we died out,” said V.C. head coach Dijon Thompson. “That’s as simple as it is. The shots were falling, and then they stopped [falling]. That’s offense; it comes and goes.”
The Defenders shot six of 11 from the field in the opening quarter thanks to a pair of three-pointers from sophomore Vladimir Prokopiv, one more from senior Christian Manley. a pair of baskets from senior Bryce Shepherd and three assists from junior Nathan Maurer. After that, the game would change to the liking of Maranatha, which entered the contest with a 5-12 record.
Chris Smith would be a thorn in V.C.’s side throughout the game. He scored seven of his nine first quarter points as part of the 12-0 run to end the stanza and finished the game with 22 points. Then there was Isaiah Lemongo, who scored 13 of his 15 points in the second half.
“We’re not a team that can play fast,” said Thompson. “Reading the game is difficult when you’re playing fast, and we have a short bench. So we can’t really play fast; we have to play at a certain pace where we’re trying to conserve energy and still put some type of pressure [on opponents].
“We knew he was going to be a problem because of his size,” Thompson later said of Smith. “We remember him from last year, so we knew he was experienced and was going to come in with some of his best.”
V.C. (8-10, 0-1) tried to get back in the game in the third quarter and chipped away at a 14-point deficit. Prokopiv began the would-be rally with a three-pointer less than a minute into the second half and Manley added a perimeter basket with 4:52 left in the quarter after Prokopiv grabbed an offensive board and passed the ball off to Manley. Less than a minute later, junior Christian Wondimu added a three-pointer to make it 35-30. But that’s as close the Defenders would get as Maranatha quickly went on an 18-3 run that lasted until there was 3:40 left in the game.
“That’s something we just talked about as a team,” said Thompson. “The third quarter has always usually hurt us. We try to make it a point to come out in the third quarter with a statement and we did. We just came up short.”
Manley led V.C. with 13 points with Prokopiv and Wondimu adding 12 and nine points, respectively. V.C. was 19 of 42 from the field shooting and of those 19 field goals, nine were three-pointers. But the Defenders managed to get just 14 rebounds and only two steals.
V.C. was entering the game with a lot of momentum, having won six straight games before falling to Ontario Christian High 55-54 in the finals of the Ontario Christian Knight Time Classic on Dec. 30. That’s after the team began the season with four straight losses and were 1-7on Dec. 9.
Both V.C. teams went to Heritage Christian High this past Tuesday and will visit Pacifica Christian High out of Santa Monica on Saturday before hosting Whittier Christian High on Tuesday. In addition, the boys travelled to Capistrano Valley Christian High this past Wednesday while the girls entertain Ocean View High on Friday.
“Even with the loss to Ontario Christian by one in the championship, we had the expectations of coming into [league] with that momentum and carrying over to this game,” said Thompson.
“Obviously, we thought we were going to get another win or two out of that Orange Tournament,” said Leffler. “Our goal was to be .500 by the time we got to the Olympic League. That would have been a transformation thing than what we had last year. But we’re close, and they’re still working hard. I think we’ll be competitive.”
