Whitney girls basketball proved anything is possible being a smaller school

The 2024-2025 Whitney High girls basketball CIF State Division IV champions. PHOTO BY LOREN KOPFF.

March 26, 2025

By Loren Kopff • @LorenKopff on X

Playing on the same court as the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, it was the Whitney High girls basketball team that left the Golden 1 Center as queens on Mar. 15. That’s the day that will go down in history of the program as the Wildcats defeated Half Moon Bay High 48-40 to claim the CIF State Division IV championship, the first for any girls basketball team in the 49-year history of the school.

At the postgame press conference following the biggest victory the school has seen in any sport, Whitney head coach Myron Jacobs stated that the team had been a hidden gem; a decent team for the past five or six years. But truth be told, the Wildcats have gone 106-58 in the six seasons Jacobs has been at the helm. He needs two more victories to become the all-time winningest girls basketball coach at the school with an enrollment of roughly 700. David Garcia went 107-95 in eight seasons from 2000-2008 and Jeff Day compiled a 101-56 record from 2012-2018.

The word decent shouldn’t apply to a program that has won 10 league titles in the past 23 seasons and finished in second place six other times in that same time span, or advanced to the CIF-Southern Section quarterfinals seven times from Garcia’s last season to before the 2024-2025 campaign. The word decent also should not apply to a program that went undefeated in the Academy League four straight seasons under Day’s watch when he went 91-21 in that time.

Whatever words you want to use to describe this program, this has been a long time coming for a school that doesn’t recruit its student-athletes. As one of the top public schools in the state every year, an entry exam decides a student’s fate upon entering the ninth grade. Athletics at Whitney may not be at the forefront, but that doesn’t discourage the ones who come out for baseball, basketball, cross country, golf, soccer, softball, swimming, tennis, track and field, volleyball or water polo.

“We kind of have to make a roster,” said Jacobs following the state championship game. “We don’t take kids; this is an academic school first and a sports school second. I think this year was a little more special for us because we had six seniors who had been in the program for the last four years that wanted more.”

What many may not know is that this isn’t the first time the school has won any type of CIF championship. The 1986 and 1987 boys basketball teams, under the tutelage of Bruce Carlisle won the Small Schools title, beating Bel-Air Prep 76-58 and Hesperia Christian High 53-44, respectively. In fact, Matt Bowley was Player of the Year in 1986.

After that, it had been 16 years before any Whitney team sport even played for a divisional title. The 2003 boys tennis team, with Wes Williams as the head coach, won the Division V crown, getting past Fairmont Prep 11-7. The 2005 team and the 2022 boys tennis teams fell in the finals, as did the 2021 boys soccer team, getting edged by Sierra Canyon High 3-2 in the Division 7 title game.

“This is big,” said Jacobs. “Like I tell everybody, this is just not for Whitney; this is for the ABC Unified School District. It just goes farther than just Whitney.

“The one thing about the City of Cerritos, even though we have rivalries like Gahr and Cerritos, we all support each other,” he later said. “We all look out for each other; it’s a small community. And like I said, this one is just not for us. It’s for every high school in the ABC Unified School District.”

The only other ABC district school to have won a state basketball championship was Artesia High in 1990, a Division II winner over Fremont High out of Sunnyvale, and back to back Division III crowns in 2005 and 2006 over Stockton-based St. Mary’s High and Oakland’s Bishop O’Dowd High.

But the state title meant more than just another 32-minute game. This was for longtime assistant coach Wayne Muramatsu, who has been involved with the girls basketball program for over two decades. He coached the 2009-2010 team that went 8-17 overall. That was the last time the Wildcats missed the playoffs. Six years before that, his daughter, Alyssa, was a sophomore on a team that went 15-11. She was the second leading scorer with 184 points, trailing another sophomore, Rachel Ny, who had 90 more points.

“Let me just say that this championship; this whole tournament and us winning this is a testament to the student-athlete,” said an emotional Muramatsu. “You don’t realize that Whitney High School has only a high school enrollment of around 700 students, and you can only enter based on an entry exam. So, what we pull from is very tight. These students are pursuing that what a student-athlete would be expected to.”

Trying to hold back his tears, Muramatsu continued to say that Whitney athletics are sometimes considered by outsiders to be ‘a bunch of nerds’. Muramatsu was also the assistant athletic director when Day was the school’s AD.

“But what you see here in front of you are students and true athletes,” he said. “And I’ve been in this program for over 20 years, starting with my own daughter, who was there for four years. Just seeing the development of the program up and down, up and down and to be here now, nothing compares.”

During the postgame interview with Nikki Kay, senior star Haylie Wang said Jacobs was the best role model she had ever had and is the most selfless coach ever.

Watching the game on Spectrum Sportsnet when I got back from Sacramento, it was interesting to hear play-by-play announcer Cooper Perkins say, with 50 seconds left in the third quarter, that Whitney had not had any success prior to Jacobs’ arrival. That was not true considering Day’s accomplishments. In fact, since the 1998-1999 season with Gary Polk as the head coach, the Wildcats have had 19 winning seasons, five losing seasons and three more when they finished at .500.

Whitney became the first public school in Division IV to win a state championship and since 1988 when the CIF had a Division IV bracket for its state basketball championships, only 13 schools from the CIF-Southern Section have come home as champions with St. Joseph High/Santa Maria being the first in 1991. A dozen champions have come from the CIF-North Coast Section with three coming from the San Diego Section.

This season in Sacramento, Whitney and Etiwanda High from the Open Division were the only two girls’ teams from the Southern Section that won a state title while for the boys, Roosevelt High (Open Division), Sierra Canyon (Division I) and San Gabriel Academy High (Division III) came home champions.

This state title wasn’t just for the six seniors, three sophomores and two juniors on this season’s team. It wasn’t just for the current administration, staff, faculty and student body. This one was for everyone associated with the school since its inception. This one was for the past girls basketball stars like Kristina DeVilla and Olivia Yaung in the late 1990s. This one was for the stars in the early 2000s like Michelle Lee, Alyssa Muramatsu and Ny. This one was for the stars in the mid 2010’s like Christine Hamakawa, Nicole Lee, Rachel Nagel, who coached 2018-2019 squad to the quarterfinals after a stellar playing career at the University of California, Davis, Reyna Ta’amu and Justine Wu.

And more recently, this one is for the stars from the past 10 seasons like Kayla Hamakawa, Janelle Ho, Kim Hosoda, Layla Lacorte, Julianna Lee, Mady Macaraeg, Rachel Song, Kylie Wang, and Makenna Yokoyama.

Whitney High School, embrace this moment; cherish it because times like this don’t happen every year.