OAKLAND — Oakland High girls basketball coach Orlando Gray said he made a promise to Mae Alexander after the 5-foot-7 forward transferred to the school before the start of the 2016-17 season.

“When she got here,” Gray said, “I told her we were going to win a title.”

Alexander, then a sophomore, and her teammates had to take Gray at his word: no girls team from the Oakland Athletic League had advanced to a state championship game since 2005 when Oakland Tech — led in part by Gray’s daughter, Alexis Gray-Lawson — won the CIF Division I title.

This weekend, though, not only is Oakland (29-5) is playing in the Division III championship game against McFarland (31-5) on Friday, but Oakland Tech (29-6) is facing Northview (30-5) for the Division IV state crown on Saturday.

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Bishop O’Dowd plays Rosary Academy in the Division I girls championship game, as three Oakland schools will compete for state titles in the same weekend for the first time.

While the Dragons are chasing their fourth state title in nine seasons, this weekend marks the first time since 1989 that two OAL programs — boys and girls — will be playing on California high school basketball’s biggest stage in the same year. Oakland High is chasing its first state crown and Tech is aiming for its third all-time.

“For so long people said our league was not good,” Gray said of the OAL. “But just like most leagues, it’s top-heavy and their leagues are no different from ours at the bottom.

“We’ve got to bring it home to make sure people know that we’re better than they say we are.”

Oakland and Oakland Tech, as have a number of other schools, have benefited from the CIF’s competitive equity model that groups teams in the state playoffs according to ability instead of enrollment. Previously, after the Oakland Section playoffs, OAL teams would primarily compete in Division I.

Since McClymonds won the Division I boys state title in 2008, though, no OAL school had made it to a Northern Regional championship game and only two times — both again by the McClymonds boys in 2012 and 2014 — had a team from the league advanced to the regional semifinals.

Last season when the competitive equity model was introduced for the first time, Oakland received the No. 16 seed in Division III and lost a squeaker, 67-63, to No. 1 Enterprise. Oakland Tech was seeded sixth in Division IV and lost to No. 11 Bradshaw Christian 81-41.

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This year, it’s been a different story.

“What I told the kids was, ‘We’re a big school, they threw us in here, all you can do is play who they tell you to play,” Tech coach Leroy Hurt said Tuesday after his team’s 59-46 win over Menlo-Atherton in the NorCal Division IV title game.

“You can’t be mad about being in Division IV, but we want to get back to playing Division I. It’s a big step, but we won’t be in Division IV next year, that’s for sure.”

Alexander, a senior forward who transferred from Mt. Eden after her freshman year, was the OAL’s Most Valuable Player this season. Guards Morgan Dunbar, a senior, and Kya Pearson, a sophomore, were both first-team all-league.

Gray said the younger players on his team challenged some of the upperclassmen for playing time. Once he decided to give the younger players a larger role after a 49-45 loss to Berkeley on Jan. 12, his team took off, and enters Friday on an 18-game win streak.

“With the young group we had, they were as good or better than our starters,” Gray said. “We could flip it now. After we lost to Berkeley High, I benched the older kids. Instead of playing 27 to 30 minutes, their minutes went down to 12. They decided that wasn’t acceptable for them. We turned it on and we haven’t lost since.”

For Tech, Stephanie Okowi, a junior, and Tiffany Siu, a senior, were also first-team all-league, and junior Jordan Smith was a second-team selection.

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For De La Salle’s seniors, the Texas trip COVID-19 zapped leaves an ache Hurt said Siu has picked it up a notch on offense since the state playoffs began and Okowi, a transfer from Emery High, had 20 points and 16 rebounds against M-A.

The Bulldogs have four losses since Dec. 28 — 49-46 in double overtime to St. Ignatius on Jan. 21 and three to Oakland, including a 52-51 loss to the Wildcats on senior night and a 45-43 defeat in the Oakland Section title game.

“We could have easily lost the league title, lost in the first round (of the regional playoffs), and called it great year,” Hurt said.

“For us, to get back to some kind of relevance, I pretty much knew we had a little something when we took (St. Ignatius) to double overtime. We lost to O’Dowd (72-41 on Dec. 27) and we just weren’t ready for that level of competition then, but we’d give them a much better game now.”