HERE are some more game-winning streaks in Philippine college basketball history. In 1994, the San Sebastian College-Recoletos Golden Stags became the second team in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) men’s basketball annals to complete a season with a perfect record at 10-0 and gain an automatic championship as the first- and second-round pennant winners.
The first to accomplish the feat: The Stags’ 1988 counterparts led by a fellow by the name of Paul Alvarez. SSC-R raced to a 9-0 start during the 1995 NCAA wars for a 19-game winning streak over two seasons before dropping its final regular assignment against the eventual second-round pennant winner Mapua Institute of Technology.
The Golden Stags, however, swept the Cardinals in the best-of-three finals to snare their third straight crown in what would later turn out to be a five-year reign – the longest in NCAA annals that San Beda College seeks to duplicate in the upcoming season.
Note that the Final Four playoff format was not instituted until 1998 and there were only six member schools in the NCAA at the time.Baste’s league record of 19-game win skein lasted for 16 years before it was obliterated by San Beda in 2011.
The Red Lions made NCAA history in 2010 with an 18-0 finish (including a 2-0 sweep of the Stags in the finals) for the most wins without a single defeat in a single campaign.
They followed it up with victories in their first eight appearances in 2011 for a 26-game winning streak over two seasons.
It was SSC-R that halted San Beda’s win streak during their first-round encounter.
The Red Lions wound up as the No. 1 seed after the elims (following a tie-breaking playoff against the Stags) and eventually swept Baste in the finals for the second of their four straight NCAA crowns to date.
I don’t exactly know if the University of the Visayas Green Lancers were able to register a double-digit winning streak over multiple seasons during their long nine-year stranglehold of the Cebu Schools Athletic Foundation Inc. (CESAFI) men’s basketball competitions since its birth in 2001 till 2009 (the last three years behind Greg Slaughter).
There were Internet reports that the Lancers lost just once in most seasons and the powerhouse Sugbu squad probably was able to string together a number of victories through the years.
And what about the Ateneo de Manila University teams of coach Norman Black that topped the University Athletic Association of the Philippines (UAAP) five years in a row from 2008 to 2012?
Add up the victories compiled consecutively from one season to the next and the Blue Eagles were able to put together three double-digit game-winning streaks during their dynastic rule, including a 16-game run at one point – the final three games from 2010 and the first 13 to start 2011 (before they dropped their final elims encounter against Adamson University).
There were also win streaks of 14 – the final 11 games of 2008 and the first three of 2009 and 12 – 12 games through Game One of the 2009 finals.
What is definite, though, no single local collegiate basketball team from the past had had a longer game-winning streak than the University of Manila Hawks.
In the first five seasons of the National Athletic Association of Schools, Colleges and Universities (NAASCU) league beginning in 2001, the Hawks under coach Loreto (Ato) Tolentino won their first 86 games through 2005.
The streak came to an end on September 10, 2005 when UM wasted a 15-point lead after three quarters and suffered a heart-breaking 81-80 loss at the hands of the Saint Clare College-Caloocan Saints when 5-foot-8 guard Dennis San Pedro’s game-ending “Hail Mary” three-point heave from midcourt astonishingly found its mark.
The streak nearly ended at 82 games when the Hawks needed a triple in the final seconds to sneak past the same Saint Clare squad, 71-70.
Regardless, the Hawks went on to annex their fifth consecutive NAASCU crown in 2005 while the Saints wound up in third place.