Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

SUN STANDOUT AWARDS:

Male Team of the Year: Bishop Gorman basketball

Gorman 7th time champs

Ray Brewer / Las Vegas Sun

Bishop Gorman High basketball players celebrate a seventh straight state championship at the Lawlor Events Center in Reno in Feb. 23, 2018.

Bishop Gorman was considered an underdog to Clark entering the season. The Chargers returned all of their starters from a team that nearly beat the Gaels in the state championship the previous season.

But Gorman won all four meetings against Clark en route to a seventh-straight state championship, including an 11-point victory in the Sunset Regional finals. The Gaels finished 29-4 overall and ranked as a consensus top-20 team nationally in what was supposed to be a rare down year.

“We used that to our advantage in our locker room,” Gorman coach Grant Rice says of preseason projections that Clark was the team to beat. “We printed out the stories and used it to motivate the kids.”

And this shouldn’t be a one-year blip. The team relied mostly on freshmen and sophomores, a core group of players who already have multiple scholarship offers from a number of powerhouse college programs.

Finalist:

• Mojave football: Advanced to the state championship after winning just one game in 2016, racking up double-digit victories for the first time in the school’s 22-year history.

This story originally appeared in the Las Vegas Weekly.