Mitty girls take fourth straight swing at Open Division state title: Is this the year the Monarchs win it?
Archbishop Mitty girls basketball knows the Golden 1 Center in Sacramento intimately.
The Monarchs have made the past four CIF state championship games in the Open Division and five overall. It’s a run of success that is unprecedented in the brief history of the top bracket, which began in 2013.
But Mitty hasn’t yet won the big one. Is this the year the Monarchs can break through and win an Open Division state title?
It’s going to be tough. Waiting for Mitty for the third straight year on Saturday night will be Etiwanda of Rancho Cucamonga, a perennial SoCal powerhouse that has taken the Monarchs down in each of the last two state championships – the first time at the buzzer, the second time in blowout fashion when Mitty was undefeated and ranked No. 1 in the country.
“I’m just watching Etiwanda film,” Mitty coach Sue Phillips said while digesting opposition research ahead of the Monarchs’ practice on Wednesday. “I don’t have a big enough stomach for that. They’re really good.”
She’s not wrong. The Eagles, the No. 6-ranked team in the country, are 27-5 this season.
They are led by a dynamic inside-outside duo: Aliyahna “Puff” Morris, a 5-foot-5 superstar point guard committed to Cal, and Grace Knox, a sterling 6-foot-3 power forward who has signed with LSU.
Both players are rated as five-stars in the class of 2025 and have been named All-Americans. Each is a top-25 player in the senior class, according to 247Sports.
“Puff Morris is a proven winner,” Phillips said. “She is an engine for them and a heartbeat for them. And then I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Grace Knox. She provides a different set of attributes to that team in which she applies force inside. And then there’s other players as well that are really stepping up to the plate.”
There’s the rub. Beyond Etiwanda’s superstars on the front line and in the backcourt, the Eagles as a whole are a well-rounded team.
Against top seed Ontario Christian in the SoCal regional championship game on Tuesday, Etiwanda cashed in 13 3-pointers, with six players converting from deep.
So Mitty (27-3) doesn’t just have to worry about the Morris-Knox one-two punch. The Eagles, almost all of them, can score from anywhere on the floor.
“We will need to try to limit, like any scouting report, those leading scorers, leading rebounders, doing what they like to do,” Phillips said. “Trying to make it difficult for them without getting burned by the other three people on the floor. We need to play this team honestly, with shading in some directions.”
Mitty, meanwhile, will have to match up without its superstar, McKenna Woliczko, who tore her ACL in January and is out for the season. Woliczko has shifted to a bench coach role without the ability to contribute on the floor.
Without her, the Monarchs rallied to sustain their 100-game-plus West Catholic Athletic League winning streak. They returned to the Open title game by holding off Clovis West in a nip-and-tuck 64-60 NorCal championship win on Tuesday in San Jose. The outcome gave Mitty its fifth consecutive regional title in the Open Division.
But Etiwanda presents a different challenge as it seeks to become the first team to win three consecutive Open Division state titles. The metamorphosis Mitty has undergone since Woliczko’s injury will be put to the test.
“It was devastating,” Phillips said. “We immediately went into, ‘Same goal, different pathway.’ It would look differently, but our goal has been to get to this game. We wanted to get to this game on Saturday, and credit to the girls who stacked days. We continued to evolve as a group, and the team found its footing.
“And McKenna continues to mentor her teammates and is a huge part of what we do behind the scenes. She’s an unbelievable competitor and terrific teammate, and so she continues to have a footprint with what we’re doing.
Mitty has an uphill battle ahead of it on Saturday. A team without an obvious focal point, the Monarchs will rely on their ensemble cast of Tiera McCarthy, Devin Cosgriff, Maliya Hunter, Emma Cook, Abigail James, Ze’Ni Patterson and others to try to get the job done in Sacramento.
“Play our game,” said McCarthy, who was an all-around dynamo against Clovis West with six points, eight steals and eight deflections defensively. “Because Mitty, whoever’s our best (player) is going to be our best. Our good is good enough.”
Rising to the occasion will require a collective effort, but the Monarchs could use a transcendent individual performance or two along the way.
“You can watch as much film as you would like, but until you’re actually standing across from them, offense and defense, it’s very difficult to predict,” Phillips said. “People will say the same thing about our team in terms of our physicality and quickness. Etiwanda would get the same type of assessment with their length and athleticism and quickness and physicality.
“We can expect that there will be lots of contact. We’ll need to play through contact. We’ll have to be on point with communication as it relates to our defensive transition. We’ll need to pound the glass from five different positions. You can predict with pretty good accuracy that those things are going to happen.”