Paleno Earns 300th Win

Sifting through old scorebooks before the start of his 17th season, Palisades High boys basketball coach James Paleno made an interesting discovery: he had 299 victories’one shy of a milestone few people in his profession reach. “It was one of the questions on a tournament information sheet I had to fill out and I had no idea so I went back and counted,” Paleno said. “That number just means I’ve been doing this [coachingI for a long time.” The Dolphins didn’t make their coach wait long for victory 300, beating Hoover of Glendale, 70-53, in last Wednesday night’s season opener. That victory improved Paleno’s record to 300 wins and 136 losses’a .688 winning percentage. As only the second head coach in the program’s history, Paleno remembers thinking he had big shoes to fill when he took over for Jerry Marvin in 1991. Since then, the Dolphins have won three league titles (1994-96) and qualified for the City Section’s upper division playoffs 15 out of 16 times. Like many coaches, Paleno remembers the losses more than the wins’particularly the Dolphins’ defeat at the hands of Crenshaw in the City semifinals in 1996. “That’s the furthest we’ve ever gotten in the playoffs,” Paleno recalled. “We had a strong team that year and we almost made it.” The fact that Palisades plays in the same league as perennial state powers Fairfax and Westchester year after year lends more credibility to Paleno’s record. “It’s great for us to be able to play those teams twice every season,” Paleno said. “If that doesn’t prepare us for the playoffs I don’t know what would.” Paleno doesn’t pay much attention to pre-season rankings, so he downplayed his team’s No. 25 spot in several Southern California polls, saying the rankings at the end of the season are the only ones that matter. Last winter, the Dolphins posted 19 wins but fell one short of a state playoff berth, losing to Sun Valley Poly, 60-58, in the City quarterfinals. “The strength of this team is how hard we work,” said Paleno, who remembers his days as a 6′ 2″ power forward at Hamilton High from 1973-75. “We usually win by out-executing and out-smarting the other team.” Paleno takes great satisfaction in seeing his former players go on to succeed in college. He laughed when telling the story of Dolphins’ starting point guard Taylor Shipley, whose father was Paleno’s teammate at Hamilton. “But I have to clarify that he was two years ahead of me,” Paleno joked. Paleno has built a stable program in which the majority of his players move up from the freshman and junior varsity squads. “The thing I’m most proud of is the fact that I’ve only coached three kids who didn’t start as students at Palisades in ninth or 10th grade,” Paleno said.