While I was at Poly doing interviews for the Wilson twins feature we ran yesterday, I stopped for a second to talk to coach Carl Buggs about his team’s unbelievable streak of nine consecutive appearances in the CIF-SS Division 1 Championship game.  Buggs swore he had no idea about the streak until he read about it in the Press Telegram.  “I had to take a step back and say, ‘Nine?'”  Yep, nine.  Here they are (and keep in mind Buggs came to Poly from Lynwood, a story worth its own article):

2002: Loss vs Lynwood

2003: Loss vs Lynwood

2004: Loss vs Lynwood

2004: Win vs Lynwood

2006: Loss vs Lynwood

2007: Win vs Brea

2008: Win vs Millikan

2009: Loss vs Cajon

2010: __? vs Corona Santiago

Part of the reason coach Buggs hadn’t kept track of it, he said, was that his team hasn’t had as much success at the sectional level as they have at state—they’re 3-5 in the CIF-SS title game but have won four straight state titles.  “So when you lose, you kind of try and put it behind you and forget about it,” he said.  “But in the big picture, it’s just consistency—I mean most teams never make it to that level, so to see that we did it nine times is amazing.”

It is, in fact, pretty amazing.  So we hit the CIF-SS record books to find out exactly how amazing it was.  We did our best to check every single year from every single sport to see where the Poly girls’ basketball run of nine straight titles fits in (keep in mind it’s a 327-page book, so we may have missed something).  A few other teams did finish in the top two, but they’ve moved themselves into pretty rarified territory, and no other basketball team in section history has hit the mark.

Here’s a list of the most D-1 championship appearances, consecutively (teams are listed in the book as either champions or first runner-ups, so some of these are from larger meets):

San Diego wrestling, 1935-1954, 20 straight

LB Wilson boys’ golf, 1942-1955, 14 straight

Newport Harbor boys’ water polo, 1974-1984, 11 straight

Peninsula girls’ tennis, 1991-2001, 11 straight

LB Poly boys’ gymnastics, 1939-1948, 10 straight

LB Poly girls’ track, 2000-Current, 10 straight

*LB Poly girls’ basketball, 2002-Current, 9 straight

One other team (Baldwin Park gymnastics in the 1960s) has rivaled the nine-straight mark, but by qualifying this year the Jackrabbits left behind a lot of competition in the history books who’d stalled at eight straight.  In terms of basketball, they stand on their own, and not just in Division 1—no other basketball team (boys or girls) in Southern Section history has been to the championship game nine consecutive times.  Mater Dei’s boys’ team has a string of five, and a string of six (some of those coming in Division 2), and Lynwood girls’ have six straight appearances in the Division 1 final from 2000-2006 (five of those coming against Poly).  Not bad for a streak the team wasn’t even aware of!

The Rabbits will face the Corona Santiago Sharks on Saturday, at 8:15pm in the Pyramid, as they try to improve to 4-5 over the last nine years, and win their third title of the last four years.