Rock Point girls overcome slow start in win over Music Mountain

By Quentin Jodie
Navajo Times

ROCK POINT, Ariz. – The Rock Point girls had to hit the reset button on Friday night.

Trailing 6-0 from the outset and 15-8 in the second quarter, the Lady Cougars (11-10) found its footing late in the first half en route to a 61-43 win over the Music Mountain Lady Warriors (6-12).

Music Mountain played in Friday’s freedom game despite bringing only five players to Rock Point as one of their starters fouled out in a testy fourth quarter.

“That’s the problem that we have with this group,” longtime Rock Point coach Andrew Reed said. “We start out slow. We don’t get our momentum going right off the bat. It seems like we’re just not in the mood to play. You know, that’s how I look at it sometimes.”

Unlike previous years, Reed said it didn’t take much to motivate his state championship teams from the 2020, 2021 and 2023 seasons. But having a young and an inexperienced team has presented some challenges for the 10th year coach.

“It takes them maybe a quarter and a half before we get our heads into the game,” he said. “You know, it’s been like that for all the games that we lost. We would get down 15, 20 points and we’ll try to make a comeback. By the time we catch up, we either lose by five, eight or 10 points.

“If we can get our act together and start playing basketball right off the bat, I think we’ll be winning some ball games,” he added.

The Reed-coached team took the lead for good at 18-17 on a transition basket from senior guard Shandiin Chee with 3:05 left in the second stanza. That go-ahead basket was part of a 25-7 run that Rock Point completed in six minutes, which led to a 33-22 halftime cushion.

Music Mountain got as close as 35-27 at the start of the third quarter with a basket from freshman Joy Sumatzkuku with six minutes left.

The Cougars, however, used a 10-4 run to open a 45-31 cushion heading into the fourth.

“We only have seven players and two got sick and so they didn’t make the trip,” Music Mountain third-year coach Freddy Watahomigie said. “We weren’t going to come if we just had five players, but the girls wanted to come.

“We tried to play an easy game, and it’s tough with only five players,” the Music Mountain coach added. “Even if I had my subs, it would have been a tough game.”

Watahomigie was pleased that his team jumped ahead by as much as seven points in the early going, but as the game wore on fatigue started to settle in.

“It got to us at the end of the first half,” Watahomigie said of the tired legs. “This is what we normally do, which is we play good for the first half. Then when the second half comes, the other team takes over, so there is a lot of fatigue going on. Some of my girls are getting over their injuries and we tried our best.”

In the fourth quarter, things got a bit testy as that stanza was marred by fouls. For the game, both teams were whistled for a combined 32 fouls with half of those infractions coming in in the final quarter. Of the 16 fouls in the final quarter, nine were against Rock Point.

“That was surprising, and the girls were wondering what was going on, too,” Reed said. “When the officials started making those calls, we had to back off.”

Watahomigie said he talked to the officials in the third quarter, and he expressed his concerns about his girls “getting beat up.”

“They weren’t calling the fouls and I told the refs that you have to protect my girls,” he said. “One of my girls got hit in the face from reaching in and then one got bumped from the behind when they were doing a fast break.”

Junior guard Kelly Watahomigie led Music Mountain with a team-best 15 points while sophomore Shelly Watahomigie added nine.

For Rock Point, junior Pepper Pete pumped in a game-high 18 points while Chee chipped in 10. The Cougars also received nine points from sophomore Destiny Shorty and eight from freshman Tatum Shorty.

On Monday night, Rock Point posted a 51-33 win over Red Mesa as the Cougars improved to 3-2 in 1A North Region play. With that, Rock Point moved up three spots to No. 15 in Tuesday’s statewide power rankings that was released by Arizona Interscholastic Association.

The Cougars will finish out the season playing at Williams on Thursday before hosting BASIS Flagstaff on Friday.

“We’re taking it one game at a time,” Reed said. “If we can play together and do what we need to do, there is nobody that can stand in our way within our region. We just need to play our game.”

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