'It's not about me' - Damien's Mike LeDuc wins first state championship of 42-year career

LeDuc has coached at Glendora as well as Damien in his career.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Mike LeDuc doesn't want the attention. 

"It's not about me," he said after leading Damien to the school's second ever state championship and first of his 42-year coaching career on Friday night. "It's about those guys," he added, pointing to his team. 

In arguably the biggest win of LeDuc's coaching career, Damien took down Clovis North 65-57 in the CIF Division I state championship from the Golden 1 Center, but the veteran coach didn't want to talk much about it.

"I'm the way I am because I strongly believe when you're coaching youth sports it's not about the adults and when the adults start getting the attention involved in youth sports it's usually negative," he said. "I don't believe in that. Give the kids their time. What I do behind the scenes is my time and what I do here is their time."

• FULL COVERAGE OF THE CIF STATE BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIPS

LeDuc fulfilled his main coaching objective on Friday and it had nothing to do with getting over the hump and winning a state title after 42 years.

"A lot of coaches have goals where they want to win a CIF championship," he said. "That's never been my goal in my life. My goal is that I want every team that I coach to have a great experience."

Mission accomplished. 

"This is special," Damien forward Kaleb Smith said. "This is something that everybody will remember for the rest of their lives."

Even though it wasn't priority No. 1 and he didn't really want to discuss what the victory meant to him, LeDuc did address winning state. 

"This feels great," he said. "... But I think we should do the best we can to funnel most of our questions about the guys and not about me."

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(All photos by Ralph Thompson)

Photo by Ralph Thompson