Ganado three-peats with fresh cast of players

REHOBOTH, N.M.

The Ganado boys’ basketball team has a distinctively different look to this year’s squad.

The Hornets graduated 11 seniors, including 6-foot-8-inch Jamaal Coleman last season so first-year coach Norman Hubbell inherited an inexperienced team.

“We’ve obviously shrunk compared to last year’s team,” Hubbell said.

As defending tournament champions of the Rehoboth Christian boys’ basketball tournament for the past two years Hubbell had some reservations about his team three-peating.

“We knew it was going to be more competitive,” he said, while noting that some of the teams from last year’s field returned most of their core players.

Nonetheless, the Hornets (5-1) reached the championship game by beating Cibecue and Tohatchi, two teams that had players bigger than Hubbell’s squad.

In the championship game, they had to deal with a pair of 6-foot-4 players but the Hornets used a strong fourth quarter to pull away from the Mancos Bluejays by a 54-39 count.

“We were obviously outsized the whole tournament,” Hubbell said.

Hubbell said he wasn’t entirely satisfied with the way his team performed during the three-day tournament but he was happy with the way they closed out each game.

“They showed some heart and they showed some real guts out there,” he said.

To win the tournament the Hornets had to get it done on the defensive end. Hubbell cycled out players in and out to keep the game at a fast pace.

“We had to be faster and I had to change out my guards the whole time,” he said. “They had to sprint, sprint and once they got tired I had to put fresh legs in there.”

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