Although Camp Verde and Mingus Union high schools each begin their basketball postseason Friday, Feb. 19, the commonalities end right there.
At noon, head girls basketball coach and athletic director Mark Showers takes his No. 21 seed Cowboys [14-14], coming off a first-round loss in their Division IV, Section I tournament, directly to the Prescott Valley Events Center to take on 12th seed Pima High School.
Later that day, Marauders head boys coach David Beery will take on the winner of a first-round Division III game at a site yet to be determined at press time. Although the top eight seeds have traditionally hosted second-round games at 6 p.m., definite times and locations will not be announced until after the opponent has been determined Tuesday, Feb. 16 — one of Holbrook or Poston Butte high schools.
Showers hopes his team can start a new winning streak against the Roughriders after fading in the second half of a 56-41 first-round sectional loss to Hopi High School in Flagstaff.
Beery looks for his team, with both regular-season and tournament titles in Section IV under its belt, to pick up its ninth straight victory and earn a trip to the state quarterfinals at Gila River Arena in Glendale.
Marauders
“We’re trying to enjoy this for a couple of days, but I don’t want to be satisfied with this,” Beery said Saturday, Feb. 13, after grinding out a 48-46 sectional tournament title win over North Canyon High School. “It was kind of ugly — by far, the worst shooting night in our streak.”
Three three-point shots each from leading scorer Ashton Loring and fellow senior guard Fabian Navarro, who combined to score more than half the Marauders’ points, bailed out 32 percent shooting and some “pretty spotty” defense, Beery said.
“We had a hard time getting into a rhythm against their zone,” he added. “They really did a good job making it hard for us with on-ball pressure. Finally, with about five minutes left, we adjusted. But it was a struggle.”
Ten points from junior Miles Tapija and two fourth-quarter baskets by senior post Kyle Houston also helped alleviate six missed free throws in 11 attempts.
“That almost got us,” he said. “We’ve been pretty good communicating on defense, but we missed some key ones in the last two minutes.”
Including the front end of a one-and-one opportunity with two seconds remaining, which the Rattlers rebounded on a night they outrebounded the Marauders by 20. They couldn’t go full court to get a shot off before the final buzzer sounded, however.
“We were pretty lucky to walk away from that one,” Beery said. “I’m glad we’re not on their side of the bracket.”
The win came the night after senior big man Gerardo Angulo had 14 points and 13 rebounds for the Marauders, who avenged one of their seven losses in a 71-65 win over Moon Valley High School, 71-65.
“We haven’t had a whole lot of real close, physical games, so having these two, back-to-back, was real good for us,” Beery said. “We had pretty balanced scoring, with four guys in double figures. Gerardo stood out just because of the long, athletic team they had.”
Beery doesn’t see any one team that is head-and-shoulders above the rest of the tournament field. He can say that, given that MUHS not only defeated No. 1 seed Estrella Foothills High School, the Marauders took apart the Wolves, 81-58, on Senior Night, Feb. 4.
“Six weeks ago, yeah, that would’ve been a shock,” he said. “As I’ve seen our confidence grow, that’s gone from surprising to kind of an expectation.
“Our section’s extremely competitive — I think we had six teams that made State. But sometime in January, we started to click and expected to be section champs.”
Playing for recognition, a first-round State bye and for senior guard Evan Snyder, whose season ended in a practice earlier that week when he broke his jaw in three places coming off a screen, the Marauders lit up the Wolves from outside and made them take tough shots.
Tapija led all scorers with 19 on seven of nine shots, while Navarro had 17 and Loring added 15 on five three-pointers.
Junior forward Issac Escalante also burned them for 12 points, while Angulo had 10 points and 12 rebounds against 6-foot, 7-inch Wolves center Rex Greabell, one of the state’s best post players, Beery said.
“He hurt us on the glass but didn’t make a whole lot of jump shots, which is usually what he does well,” Beery said. “We pretty much played zone defense this entire run. It’s been an adjustment for me. Until this last month we were not a very good zone team.
“But we just continually reinforced that we’re going to push the ball [and] go more full-court pressure. It’s foreign territory for this program — we haven’t had a lot of success — but we’re pretty excited now.
Cowboys
As more of a half-court team that plays man-to-man defense, Pima will be a good matchup for the Cowboys, Showers thinks.
“We’re a little down this year — from a talent standpoint, I’m going to say more than in the last 14 years,” he said. “Our goal, at the beginning of the season, was to hopefully make it to the playoffs. So we made it; our season was a success.”
Showers will be glad just to have a bench of more than one player Feb. 19 after running out of energy in the first round of sectionals against Hopi with only six players.
“It was a good game until halftime,” he said. “We were in trouble playing a [reservation] team in Flagstaff with basically one sub. The second half, with that elevation, we basically ran out of gas.”
Katrina Poelstra, the team’s young spark plug off the bench this season, is expected to return from a sprained ankle Feb. 19, along with fellow freshman Hope Ontiveros.
The loss, Showers hoped, would drop the Cowboys no more than four spots from No. 18 in the rankings.
“When you’re late in the season, there isn’t as much fluctuation in the rankings algorithm,” he said. “We’re going to play hard and see what happens.”
For more photos, please see the Wednesday, Feb. 17, issues of the Camp Verde Journal and Cottonwood Journal Extra.
