Trinity Classical Academy girls basketball coach James DeMonbrun had been texting Notre Dame coach Jena Laolagi throughout the week leading up to the CIF Southern Section first-round playoff game between the two teams.
“I said hey, don’t judge us,” DeMonbrun said. “You guys come from the Mission League and you’re coming over here and we’re playing at Newhall Church of the Nazarene.”
Trinity might be the only team in Division 2A that doesn’t have a home gym of its own. It plays and practices at a church’s gym, except for on Wednesdays, which is when the church needs the gym for youth group meetings.
There’s quite a few things that set the Valencia K-12 school of 160 students apart from the rest, and yet here they are.
When DeMonbrun took over Trinity’s girls basketball program four years ago, there were 13 players on a team that was competing in Division 5AA. They went 4-0 in Heritage League play against teams like Lancaster Baptist and Faith Baptist — two teams DeMonbrun had never heard of before coming to Trinity.
The Knights won a CIF-SS championship that season as well as a SoCal Regional title, then reached the Division 3A semifinals and state semifinals the season after. The players had never had such a long playoff run before, and were unsure of what the success meant or how long the season would be.
“It used to sound like French to them,” DeMonbrun said. “And we don’t learn French (at Trinity), we learn Latin.”
They were in Division 3A the season after that and were placed in 2A this season.
The Heritage League, comprised of similarly-sized small schools, wasn’t competitive enough to prepare the Knights for the division the CIF-SS had placed them in, so DeMonbrun added nearby Foothill League teams Saugus and Golden Valley to the schedule.
They beat both teams by at least 19 points. Tournaments also exposed Trinity to higher-level teams than they’d see in league play.
A handful of college-bound players have…
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