Coach Proud of Basketball Team
By John Earp
Last week, the Jal High School Varsity Boys’ Basketball Team’s post-season hopes ended in the state 2A quarterfinals versus the Texico Wolverines. The Panthers competed very well in the first half. At halftime, the Wolverines only led by one point, 27-26. Unfortunately for the Panthers, the second half did not go nearly as well as the first half.
Coach Emmy Lujan said, “We played really well in the first half as a team and we did we did some really good things. We played hard on defense. We played hard around the basket. We kept them from getting a lot of second chance points in that first half. We did a great job of executing the game plan in the first half, and in the second half, we didn’t execute like we needed to offensively and we really got hammered on the rebounding side of it. They were able to get a lot of second chance points off that. We weren’t able to get any. It was pretty much one shot and done and then they were off to the races. So, it was just a tough second half in that aspect. Defensively we kind of didn’t execute our game. We didn’t execute our assignments as well as we did in the first half, and with a team like that, obviously, you know, they ended up winning the state championship. That’s a very solid team. They can play all 14 kids they have on the roster and they really don’t miss a beat. So, when you miss some assignments defensively and you don’t rebound, it’s kind of tough. I think those were the two main things that got us in the second half. We didn’t keep them off the boards as much as we did in the first half and defensively, we didn’t execute our assignments. We lost some kids here and there and offensively we couldn’t make any baskets and when we did shoot, we didn’t we didn’t hit anything and we were getting one shot and they were getting the rebound and coming down and executing more times than we did.”
About his team this year, Lujan says, “They obviously had a really good season.”
The Panther Boys’ Basketball Team has five seniors graduating this year, but has five juniors coming back, two of which were starters this year. He said, “Three of the other guys did really well on the JV side of it. One of them came in and played big minutes for us on the varsity side. So we all have three kids that we know will start right off the bat that know the system and know what we’re doing, and then we’ll just plug in what we have from the JV side and, you know, we should be able to compete again. We will be going into a second year, third year of this new offense and things that we’re trying to do some new things that we’ve added and some different styles that we started trying to play. But it’ll all just come down to the work we put in this summer, how many kids come out this summer and really, really work on the game because that’s when you really get to work on your individual stuff and get a head start on everything for the year. How much work we put in the summer and some of these team camps that we do, and implementing and working on the individual side of it, the ball handling, the individual skill work, comes in the summer because you don’t get much time to do that during the year during the season, you’re working on the team aspect of everything. So, during the summer, that whole month of June is where you really try to get in the individual skills and then after that it’s how much these kids put in on their own time as the season comes closer to next year, how much time they put in individually in the gym and outside of practices and things like that. But again, I mean, I think we bring back some key points and some guys that are going to grow up and we’ll see what we’ll be able to do next.”