Has Shiprock turned corner with win over Tohatchi?

TOHATCHI, N.M.

The Shiprock Lady Chieftains started out the season losing five straight games under first-year head coach Vernetta Begay.

Things were looking bleak for the young Chieftain squad but they may have turned a corner as Shiprock posted its second consecutive win on Tuesday night by outlasting Tohatchi 63-57 on the road.

“We’re starting to unify as a team,” Begay said when asked about those early hiccups, which included a one-point setback to Alamogordo at the Gallup John Lomasney Invitational. “I’m getting to know the girls and they’re getting to know me. It’s a building process but I feel like we’re coming around. They have a lot of potential and they’re just great all around kids.”

To secure their second win of the season, the Chieftains overcame a two-point deficit and closed out the contest on an 8-0 run with senior wing Sanaa Keeswood and junior post Evette Lansing combining for six of those points.

“The kids started to play with a little bit of heart and they stayed disciplined,” Begay said. “Those are things that we tell them all the time and they actually took that in. Before that we were running around like chickens without its head. Now we’re starting to run our offense and run a solid defense.”

Lansing, who led all scorers with 27 points, started the rally with an inside post move that tied the contest at 57-all with just over two minutes remaining.

The Cougars, who recently captured the Armendariz tournament at Capital High School in Santa Fe, came up empty on their last five possessions as they were forced to foul.

Shiprock sealed the win by going 6-of-8 at the charity line with Keeswood going a perfect 4-for-4. For the game, the Chieftains made 16-of-35 free throws.

“We just didn’t make the plays towards the end,” a disappointed Tohatchi coach Tanisha Bitsoi said. “We had plenty of opportunities tonight. The game didn’t go in our favor from the start to the very end but we had some opportunities to win. We just didn’t finish.”

Bitsoi, whose team dropped to 6-2 overall, felt that her team took a step back after having some successful tournament runs at the Gallup John Lomasney Invitational and the championship win at the Armendariz tournament.

“We looked like a whole different team and tonight we just laid an egg,” she said. “We played very undisciplined and I felt like we had a lack of focus. I don’t know if they thought that Shiprock was going to lie over and let us run them over. We just weren’t ready tonight.”

Bitsoi said the well-practiced fundamentals and the solid concepts they learned seemed to have evaporated for much of the game, as they could not put away Shiprock despite getting some getting some solid contributions from Cameron Tsosie and Gabrielle Thomas.

The two seniors helped the Cougars stake a 21-15 cushion after one quarter of play with Thomas hitting three treys while Tsosie added seven points.

“This is a veteran team but I feel like we did some things that were very uncharacteristic,” the Tohatchi coach said. “This is perhaps our wakeup call.”

In the second, the Cougars had an answer for every Shiprock basket but in the final three minutes of the half the Chieftains went on a 15-3 run to go up 40-33 at the break.

In that run, Lansing scored had four points as she finished off the second stanza with 14 points.

“She was on fire,” Begay said of her pupil. “When she’s hitting like that it basically opened up the space for our outside players.”

In the third, Tohatchi zoned in on Lansing, as she was held scoreless but in the fourth she tallied nine of her game-high 27 points.

Keeswood, Shiprock’s other threat, finished with 18 points.

“This was a team win,” Begay said. “We had other kids contribute in their own way. We had some that drove to the basket and we had others grab rebounds.

“Everybody that scored, scored for the team,” she added. “They didn’t do it as individuals and that is the thing we’re trying to teach the kids.”

Shiprock is scheduled to play Farmington in a nondistrict game on Thursday while Tohatchi is slated to play Tularosa at the Texico Invitational.

“We have to have a short memory because we have Tularosa on Thursday and they’re supposed to be very good,” Bitsoi said of their opening round match.

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