Long Beach Poly basketball seeking first state title since 1984

Thirty-two minutes of basketball are all that stand between the Long Beach Poly boys basketball team and history. The Jackrabbits will face San Mateo Serra on Saturday at 4 p.m. in the Sleep Train Arena in Sacramento, with the CIF State Division II championship up for grabs.

For Poly fans who aren’t making the trip, the game will be televised live on Time Waer Sportsnet at 4 p.m., and streamed for free at TWCcommunity.com.

• RELATED: Get live updates of Poly vs. San Mateo Serra championship game here

A win for Poly would mean the program’s third-ever state championship, with the first in 1921 and the second in 1984; it would be a record 37th state championship for the school across all sports.

Over the past three decades-plus, the Jackrabbits have won plenty of CIF-SS championships — the school has 20 in all. But the state title has eluded plenty of great Jackrabbit squads.

“My junior year I thought we had a team to win state,” said Poly coach Shelton Diggs, who played for the Jackrabbits. “In 2000, 2002, then 2011, all those teams were good enough. We want to win this for all those teams that couldn’t get over the hump.”

• RELATED: Long Beach Poly basketball coaches carrying Jackrabbit tradition forward

Poly (24-10) has the advantage athletically, but it will be challenged by the bigs of Serra (25-6), including 6-foot-5 point forward Jake Killingsworth, who’s headed to Columbia. Killingsworth had 12 points, 14 rebounds and eight assists in the NorCal Regional championship game, and poses a different issue for the Jackrabbits, since most of the top players in Division II have excelled on the perimeter.

“Usually, it’s Harrison Boer with the big assignment on the perimeter,” said Poly’s Zafir Williams, who will likely draw the defensive assignment on Killingsworth. The Padres feature some other posts, including a sophomore 7-footer, but Serra’s scoring tends to come more from spot-up shooters on the perimeter.

“They’re going to shoot it well, and they’re a very good defensive team,” Diggs said. “They play man-to-man full court and they rotate well and look to take charges. We have to be on our game.”

It’s been a wild ride for the Jackrabbits, who were missing between two and four starters for most of the season. They had senior leader Drew Buggs, a Hawaii signee, go down with a leg injury in just the third game of the year. The captain made it back onto the floor just before the playoffs, and has been effective despite not being fully recovered. In last Saturday’s SoCal Regional he had 20 points, six rebounds, six assists, and three steals.

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The power in the Jackrabbits’ run has been from Williams, who’s averaging 19 points and 10 rebounds per game. Boer is the only Jackrabbit to start every game, and is averaging 12.3 points while also usually guarding an opponent’s best player.

“We’ll need a big game from all of our top guys and we need our role players to step up like they have been all playoffs,” said Diggs.

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