Bellarmine
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Location: San Jose, CA | ||||
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Coach | Chris Fleitas | |||
State championships | NorCal 2008 | |||
Notable national results | 4th at 2010 HSNCT |
Bellarmine College Preparatory School is a Catholic private school located in San Jose, California. Their recent successes include successful finishes in the NorCal circuit, and placing 4th at the 2010 HSNCT.
Current players include Nikhil Desai and Tanay Kothari.
The Bellarmine team began in 2007, competing at only a few local tournaments on mostly A-level sets (to this day, captain Tanay Kothari has never played a non-NAQT tournament). Its A team generally consisted of seniors Matt Menard and Raphael Murillo, junior James Hill III, and freshman Tanay Kothari. Matt led Bellarmine's scoring throughout the year.
The team got more serious in 2008-2009, as freshmen Nikhil Desai and Ankit Aggarwal and sophomore Phil Yakushev entered the team. Those three would join senior Terry Drinkwater and sophomore Ben Gulmon on the incredibly young Bellarmine B, which would tie for 43rd at HSNCT with Bellarmine A, a team consisting of seniors Garrett Kingman, Nitin Egbert, and James Hill III, junior Vinayak Viswanadham, and sophomore Tanay Kothari. The aforementioned term "team got more serious" does not, of course, refer to playing on better sets; rather, the team started studying actively.
The 2009-2010 season, Bellarmine's third, saw the team pick up the pace. Tanay Kothari and Nikhil Desai traded "lead scorer" status at early tournaments in November (Saratoga, which Bellarmine won by beating 10 MSJ teams in a row, and Cardinal Junior Classic, in which Bellarmine blew a lead of 230 - (-10) against MSJ A to take second). The team then proceeded not to play a tournament until February (for Tanay, until HSNCT), at which point Bellarmine participated in the T-Party at Stanford. A team of Nikhil, Phil, Ankit, and freshman John Cherian finished with a 2-10 record, with wins over Case Western Reserve and Berkeley B. Nikhil picked up the 4th place scoring prize, putting up about 40ppg. The team of Nikhil, Phil, Ankit, Vinay, and freshman Kshithij Shrinath then competed at the West Coast Invitational, finishing 2nd on both days. Nikhil picked up the 2nd place scoring prize on both days and the neg prize on the second, finishing with about 70ppg each day and putting up more than 30 powers on the D2-SCT set.
Bellarmine qualified its A team for the 2010 HSNCT. The team took 4th overall.
In the summer, Nikhil and Tanay worked on BELFAST.