No. 4 Lady Bobcats bounce back with win over Crownpoint

CROWNPOINT – The Bloomfield girls basketball team soared as high as No. 3 in the New Mexico High School Coaches poll the first week of January.

A two-game skid, however, dropped the Lady Bobcats one spot in the latest Class 4A statewide rankings that was released on Monday afternoon.

“This is new for us,” Bloomfield senior Danielle Johnson said. “I’ve been with the program for four years and we’ve never been ranked that high before.

“It’s just a huge accomplishment,” she added.

The Bobcats opened the season with a 9-0 record. Last week, however, they came up short to Durango (Colo.), 35-32, and to Navajo Prep, 56-34, in back-to-back games.

On Saturday afternoon, Bloomfield rebounded with a resounding 49-14 win over Crownpoint on the road.

“I feel like this game gave us a confidence boost after those two losses,” Bloomfield power forward Aliya Quintana said. “We actually improved on our defense a lot from those last two games.”

Five players scored for Bloomfield, with Johnson leading the way with 17 points while Delanna Russell added 13 and Quintana finished with 10.

The two losses were hard to swallow for the Bobcat team, especially the 22-point setback to Navajo Prep. Earlier this season, Bloomfield defeated ‘Prep 61-25 during the Shiprock tournament.

“I think they kind of finally figured out their whole team,” Quintana said of ‘Prep. “We were expecting them to play like they did at the Shiprock tournament, but they’ve improved.”

“We weren’t expecting them to come out as hard as they did,” Johnson said. “I think that got us frazzled. We just had a lack of communication because a lot of times we didn’t know what was going on.”

With that defeat, second-year coach Brady Rivers was looking for his team to refocus for its game with Crownpoint.

“We saw some things on film that we really needed to do a better job at, especially when we were in a zone,” Brady said. “We wanted to tighten it up.”

The Bobcats did just that as they made Crownpoint work for all five field goals it made, headed by senior Tyra Tsosie’s six points.

“We’ve actually played pretty good defense up to the Navajo Prep game,” Brady said. “We wanted to get back to that and the girls responded. They were communicating, they put pressure on the ball and the help defense was there.”

Not only that, but they also kept Crownpoint off the boards for much of the contest.

“We talked about being fundamentally sound and I thought we did a great job of doing that today,” Brady said.

As for its rise in the state rankings, the Bloomfield coach didn’t see that coming despite the Bobcats returning four core players from last season’s state playoff team that reached the 4A state quarterfinals.

“We didn’t expect to start that way, but we’re excited,” Rivers said. “The girls don’t know what it’s like to be the hunted. They’re so used to being the hunter.”

In those early games, Bloomfield held its opponents to 29.3 points per game while scoring at a 53.4 per clip.

“We started off playing really well, but it got to a point to where the girls started thinking, ‘Now that we’re winning, we’re good,’” Rivers said. “As coaches we tried to warn them it was going to hit us at some point. It hit us not one game, but two in a row, so in practice it got their attention.”

The Bobcats are headed to the Hope Christian tournament this week and they open up with Taos today at noon.

In the next round, the Bobcats will face either Hope Christian or Hot Springs in the top half of the bracket. The bottom half has Los Lunas, Artesia, St. Pius and West Las Vegas.

“We have to play our own game,” Johnson said. “We have to play under control because sometimes we want to run with the other team. We got to slow things down and just communicate with the coaches and run the plays that we need to run.”

Following that tournament, Bloomfield starts the district season playing defending state champ and No. 2-ranked Gallup on Tuesday night.

On Jan. 30, Bloomfield will host top-ranked Kirtland Central in another district showdown.

“Kirtland and Gallup are pretty good,” Rivers said. “But the other teams in our district are going to get after it. All of the teams are playing well, so there’s no cakewalk. I think every game is gonna be a fight.”

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