While the Mingus girls basketball game played a decent defensive game against Lee Williams on Friday, Feb. 26, the offense couldn’t follow suit. That led to the Marauders being on the wrong side of the final score against the Volunteers.
Lee Williams defeated Mingus 44-34, completing the season sweep of its 4A Grand Canyon Section rival. When the Marauders are at their best, they play fast on defense and slow on offense. Looking back at the game, the Mingus players and coaches knew that things didn’t go at the desired pace.
“We definitely didn’t slow it down on offense,” senior guard Yazmein Mestas said. “We were going way too fast. We were a little scattered today.”
The game flipped in the second quarter. Despite scoring only eight points in the opening quarter, the Marauders took an 8-4 lead after one. The Volunteers found their offense in the second quarter, scoring 17 points. Mingus, meanwhile, could only muster five. That gave Lee Williams a 21-13 lead at halftime. The Volunteers maintained a significant lead throughout the rest of the game.
A big part of the second quarter discrepancy was free throws. Lee Williams attempted eight shots from the charity stripe in that quarter while Mingus only attempted two.
“When we give teams those freebies like that we get behind and then we struggle,” Mingus coach Paul Ventura said. “I thought we started well in the first quarter. In the second quarter we had a lull where we didn’t score and they scored a few times. That made the score kind of flip flop. That was a lack of concentration on our part more than anything else.”
The scattered pace led to a dramatic lack of balance in the Marauders’ offense. Senior forward Chayce Doerksen finished the game with 19, which matched Volunteers guard Lia Lucero for the game high. But sophomore forward Taylor Brock, who finished the game with eight points, was the only other Mingus player to top three points.
Conversely, Lee Williams sophomore center Brooke Hunter had 10 points while two other Volunteers had four.
For Ventura, the poor offensive balance came from a lack of patience.
“Offensively we had too many one pass, one shot possessions, especially in the beginning of the second half,” Ventura added. “We’d come down the floor, break the press and take one shot. Nobody’s even there to get a rebound yet. That’s an empty possession. When we run the offense, we’re balanced and we have spacing and the ball moves, we look good. We always get a good shot. Unfortunately, we’ve had too many spurts where we didn’t do that.”
The Marauders were scheduled to finish the season with games against Flagstaff, Buckeye Union and Coconino. Unfortunately, those games had to be canceled due to COVID-19 protocols in the Mingus program.
With that, the Marauders finish the season at 4-10 overall and 2-8 in the 4A Grand Canyon Section.
The Mingus players have seen an improvement from the team not only from the winless season last year but even the beginning of this one.
“I think coming from a season where we didn’t have any wins to a season where we’ve had four and even at the beginning of the season, we were losing by 30 points — now we’re only losing those games by five,” Doerksen said. “We’re really coming back and working as a team. That’s thanks to the coaches and the girls for working hard at it.”
