SF’s best basketball team isn’t the Warriors. It’s the Crusaders

It happened right under the noses of San Francisco sports fans, as they lamented a January without a 49ers playoff game and fretted about the Warriors’ late-season, pre-Jimmy Butler standing. 

Almost in the dark of night, the city’s most dominant basketball team — possibly ever — had assembled at Archbishop Riordan, an Ingleside Catholic school with an enrollment a shade below 1,000 students. The Riordan Crusaders were so damn good this year it sometimes felt like they were punishing their opponents just for showing up. 

They won all 14 of their West Catholic Athletic League games by at least 25 points. Seven were ended with a “mercy rule” after the Crusaders ran up the score by 40. Their record would reach 29-1, but it wasn’t just the winning — it was how they went about it.

There were the highlight-reel dunks from stars Jasir Rencher and Andrew Hilman, flashily brandishing their status as top-100 national recruits. There were the three-point barrages, including the 9 triples hit by Rencher in a January win at Archbishop Mitty. There were the blocks by 6-foot-10 center Nes Emeneke and the steals by Hilman that led to more dunks. 

That the brash behavior was coming out of a San Francisco school and not one of the traditional prep powerhouses of Oakland or Contra Costa County made it all the more captivating for those who knew to pay attention. 

The Crusaders’ Northern California Open Division championship triumph over Concord’s De La Salle on Tuesday sold out the 1,200 seats at Riordan’s home gym. Well before tipoff, the line to get in the door stretched across the school’s campus. With that victory, Riordan became the first San Francisco school ever to play for the CIF Open Division title, which will be held on  Saturday night at 8 p.m., against Roosevelt (Eastvale) at Sacramento’s Golden 1 Center. The Crusaders will also attempt to become just the second Northern California team to bring home the Open Division state title, the first since 2015. 

Led by seniors Rencher and Emeneke and the junior point guard Hilman, Riordan ran roughshod over the WCAL, typically one of the strongest and most competitive leagues in the entire state. Even with the outcome of the games a foregone conclusion, fans turned out in droves to see the Crusaders because this group knows how to entertain. 

During a Jan. 21 win at Archbishop Mitty, Rencher, a Texas A&M commit, not only drained those league-record nine 3-pointers, he also threw down a dazzling 360-degree dunk.

A week later, he pulled off a double-clutch reverse jam during a rout of rival St. Ignatius, the type of dunk fans would see at the NBA Slam Dunk Contest, but with tickets at a fraction of the cost. Hilman, whose scholarship offers include Cal, Stanford, Washington, and USF, posterized an opponent during a 58-point throttling of Sacred Heart Cathedral. 

Last Saturday against Salesian, Rencher nearly blew the roof off the Crusader Forum, racing through the lane and throwing down a one-handed dunk over a Salesian defender.

“Like Jayson Tatum said, people come to watch you play, you’re gonna put on a show every night,” Rencher said earlier this season. “It’s what we do best.”

Riordan has long been known as a basketball powerhouse, winning the 2002 CIF Division 3 championship and regularly churning out Division I prospects. But this year’s Crusaders have even more talent than past squads, with a pair of seniors committed to Division I colleges, and at least a half-dozen other players with a chance to play at the next level. But they’re also simply more of a team than they’ve been in the recent past.

“These guys love being here every day,” Riordan head coach Joey Curtin said after Tuesday’s 52-40 win over De La Salle. “We’ve had one bad practice, if that, all year.”

For Curtin, who’s in his ninth year running the program, coaching at Riordan has to feel akin to being a key cog in the family business. The head coach’s brother, Danny, is the school’s vice president of enrollment and strategy and plays a large role in the boarding program. Their sister, Jen, is the dean of students and head coach of the fledgling girl’s volleyball program. And their father, Joe, is an assistant on the football staff and a fixture at any and all things Riordan.

A 2001 graduate of the school, Joey has taken advantage of Riordan’s 2011 addition of a boarding program, building an international flavor into the roster. Hilman and Emeneke — a UC Irvine signee — are both from Cameroon, and 6-foot-9 junior forward JP Pihtovs is from Latvia. Backups JC Chacon and Diego Martin are from Spain, and in recent years the team has also featured players from New Zealand, Serbia, and South Sudan.

“I believe we have 88 boarding students on campus from about 20 different countries,” Curtin said. “San Francisco is such an international city and welcomes all types of people, and the school has become a microcosm of that.

“I know students who have graduated, went off to college, and are now living abroad because their eyes were opened to see other opportunities around the globe from their time at Riordan and their interaction with the boarding program. The basketball program has obviously been impacted, as it’s had international players for over a decade now.”

The combination of international flair and local talents like Rencher (Oakland) and guard Ryder Bush (East Palo Alto) has created a team that’s lethal in transition and simply fun to watch.

Curtin loves the style points his players can provide, but he knows it will take more to pull off a win over Roosevelt of Riverside County, ranked No. 2 nationally by MaxPreps, and bring the state championship trophy back to Northern California.

“I’m just so proud of them being so focused and so together and playing with such tenacity game after game. That takes a lot of mental fortitude,” Curtin said. “We have that responsibility to show up to play, and the high-effort plays are the ones that lead to the big dunks.”

Riordan isn’t the only San Francisco team at the state championships this weekend. International — yes, the school with the French bilingual program — won the CIF Division 5 championship on Friday afternoon, 71-52 over Pomona’s Diamond Ranch.

Students who would normally spend their Friday conjugating indicative verbs at the Oak Street campus instead took buses to Sacramento as the school canceled classes for the day to rally behind the team.

Their support didn’t go unnoticed, as the Jaguars rallied from a 10-point second-quarter deficit, pulled ahead with a 19-3 run in the third quarter, and buried the Panthers with a 15-2 run in the fourth after Diamond Ranch had cut it to two.

“It’s pretty cool when the whole school’s out there supporting you,” said 6-foot-5 center Will Savill-Welch, who had 12 points, 18 rebounds, and seven blocks. “I’ll remember that forever.”

Conor Maguire, who made headlines by hitting a North Coast Section record 14 3-pointers on his Senior Night, was shut down from deep. But the lefty point guard still scored a game-high 32 points. International (25-12) went just 2-for-18 from three overall, struggling to adjust from the confines of their 300-seat gym to Golden 1 Center, which holds 17,608. 

“Our lower school has really good basketball players, but we lose a lot of them when they go to high school,” said Maguire, who scored 20 in the second half. “Hopefully this could be a start for us to keep those players at our school. Coming here for high school with coach Paul [Cortes] was one of the best decisions I ever made.”