2000, 1975 Panther Champs Honored at the Pit

By John Earp

Last Saturday at the University of New Mexico Pit, the New Mexico Athletics Association honored the 2000 Jal High School Panthers Basketball Team for their state championship win that year. Representing the Panthers were Emmy Lujan and Omero Cordova as well as Assistant Coach Chad Merchant.

Reflecting on the 2000 Panthers, Lujan said, “It was a great year. We had a really solid team and we lost in the semifinals in the last seconds to Fort Sumner here at home in football and then we lost the basketball state championship to Hope Christian our junior year. So going into the next year we kind of had a bad taste in our mouth. Those are the kind of opportunities you really don’t want to let slip by. It’s very rare that you get an opportunity to redeem yourself, and we were able to really accomplish that the next year. We had a group of guys that we had grown up together, played together, so it was bittersweet. We had a group of guys that we had grown up with in Cosme Cervantes, Cory Hunter, Cody Abel, Joey Melancon and myself. We were all seniors that year. We had grown up that year and played together. We had some new coaches that had come in, Coach Norman Cline and Coach Chad Merchant that had come in a couple of years earlier and they kind of brought a different perspective to the game than we had with the old coach, Ken Ferguson. It was just a special year. We were able to win it in football that year and then we turned around and really had to battle and we were able to pull it off and win it in basketball as well. It was a pretty neat deal. It hadn’t been done in a long time in basketball. And so for us to be able to accomplish that that year was a pretty neat deal for all of us.”

Also recognized at the ceremony at the Pit last Saturday was the 50-year anniversary of the Jal Panthers Basketball Team winning the 2A State Championship in 1975. Mike Fowler represented the 1975 Panthers at the ceremony.