Panthers play McCurdy Saturday
By John Earp
The Jal High School Boys’ Basketball Team (15-12 overall; 7-3 in district) secured a spot in the state tournament with last Sunday’s announcement from NMAA of the Panthers being seeded #9. They will play #8 seed McCurdy Charter School (19-9 overall; 8-2 in district 2A District 5) in Espanola this Saturday at 3:00 p.m. in the first round of the state tournament, according to Coach Emmy Lujan.
Lujan says that in the last two to three weeks of the season his team started to play really well. “We started to figure out what we were trying to do. I know I’ve been coaching here for about 12 years now, 13 years, but this is a group where we don’t have a big player as in years past, so we kind of started transitioning to a smaller package-type style offensively and defensively. We’ve had to change some things up on our kids, you know, we’re about 5’7” to 5’9,” and we’ve got learn to play big. We’ve got to learn to find the gaps to get rebounds and to use our quickness, you know, and get into the little cracks and get rebounds over those kids that are bigger than us and try to push the ball a lot more and be more transitional. We do put up a lot of shots and that’s something we have to try to do. We got a lot of shooters. So, we do that and defensively we want to kind of be like flies and gnats, we just want to be annoying. And as much as possible, you know, it was a tough transition because a lot of these guys played with those big kids, and so they didn’t have to do a lot of the things that they’re being asked to do. The thing is, we got to have, everybody that steps on the court has to play that type of basketball. You can’t have one or two guys trying to rebound and the rest not. So I think when we started to kind of figure it out and we had a break, we took a time there where we played a lot of games.”
Lujan says that this year has been probably the toughest schedule his team has had since he’s been head coach. He says, “I mean, we played 5A Andrews. We played 4A Snyder, Texas. We played 4A Kermit. We played a team out of Midland. We played Magdalena twice. We played Texico twice. We played Eunice twice and Hagerman twice. We played Ruidoso. We played NMMI. So we had a really gruesome schedule for learning time. So we were all thrown into the fire early in the season and throughout the season, and then when we finally kind of caught a break where we got three or four days to practice and a couple days off where we just kind of sat back and just tried to regroup. We started to see it coming along. One thing was trying to figure out how much conditioning we needed to do to play that type of game, because we’re not so much used to it basically going constantly. So you kind of get caught up as a coach coaching it and things like that. Also, you get caught up in trying to figure out, okay, ‘How much do I push them?’ and ‘How much do I rest them?’”
As usual, the Panthers are in what is no doubt just about the toughest district in the state (2A District 4) with four out of the six teams in the district qualifying for the state tournament; Texico, Eunice, Jal, and Hagerman.