One of the most storied basketball games in Santa Cruz County history was played by the faculty of San Lorenzo Valley High School.
In March of 1973, the Oakland Raiders NFL football team grouped a few of their football players with basketball backgrounds together and headed to Felton to teach the SLV High School faculty a thing or two about genetic dispositions in a “Raiders versus the Faculty” fund raiser.
Led by Raider greats Art Shell, Kenny Stabler and Fred Biletnikoff, the school’s faculty was obviously over matched by the future Hall of Fame football players.
Biletnikoff had been a first-team all-state basketball player in Pennsylvania his senior year in high school, and Stabler averaged 29 points a game throughout his high school career. The likes of 5-foot, 10-inch San Lorenzo Valley High basketball coach Dave Mercer, posted little threat to the foreboding Raiders as they headed into the game.
The game was to go down as one for the history books.
Mercer single-handedly shredded the Raiders. He scored 60 points and sank two game-winning free throws in the last 10 seconds to beat the fearsome Raiders 93-91 before a standing-room-only crowd at the SLV High School gym in Felton.
Mercer was nearly flawless in the game, going 22-23 at the free throw line and sinking 19-23 of his shots from the field.
“That was one of those days for me where everything just went right,” Mercer said. “Biletnikoff was in fits by the end of the game and I was loving every minute of it.”
The rivalry deepened the following night as the Raiders then played an All-County All-Star team put together for a game at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium where Mercer was trash talked by the Hall-of-Fame wide receiver all game. At one point Mercer stole a pass from Biletnikoff and took it down for a lay-up and poked “Nice pass Freddy” as he jogged back down the court.
The following year the Raiders got redemption. Though Mercer put up 33 points in a rematch in SLV, but the faculty lost and the Raiders had their revenge.
Mercer said a Bay Area reporter once asked a Raiders player late in the season his approach to the last four big games. “We’ve got five,” the player corrected. “We’ve got another one in Felton.”
Mercer moved with his family to Watsonville from Michigan when he was 12 years old, and he starred in football, basketball and baseball at Watsonville High. He attended San Jose State on a football scholarship as a wide receiver and kick returner where he set a nefarious record for the most fair catches in a game in a 24- 0 victory over Cal in 1966, he caught eight.
While he was earning his teaching credential, he coached the junior varsity football team at newly formed Aptos High School, where he coached the team to a 1-8-1 season.
“The Varsity team went 0-10, the freshman team went 0-10 so I coached the very first victory that Aptos High had ever achieved,” Mercer said. “I love pointing that out to Aptos coaches.”
After earning his credential he began a long and successful career coaching at San Lorenzo Valley High School where he coached varsity basketball for nine years and the junior varsity football team from 1970-1996.
He was the varsity basketball coach when the Raiders came to town in 1973.
He moved up to the varsity level when his son Mark was a senior in 1996 and served as offensive coordinator under Head Coach Doug Morris. That year was the beginning of a 7 year streak where the Cougars won the Santa Cruz Coast Athletic League title seven years in a row.
Mercer recently moved back to the junior varsity level to coach with his son Mark, and last season surpassed his 200th career victory as a coach.
His three sons are all involved in education. His oldest, Brian is a school principal in Los Angeles County, Mark is a physical education teacher at SLV Middle School and Jeff teaches elementary school in Cupertino.
Mercer and his wife Chris live in the house they bought in 1973 in Ben Lomond and are actively spending their retirement on home improvements.
Dave suffered his second mild heart attack a few weeks ago and is recovering from a valve transplant and a single bypass surgery
