Eagles soar past Lions into CIF-SDS final
EL CENTRO — The Southwest Lady Eagles are headed to the CIF-SDS finals.
It’s been a long, hard road, but they no longer have to guess at what the top of the mountain looks like. They can see it from here.
The Eagles advanced to the championship round on Tuesday, defeating the visiting Liberty Charter Lions 58-50 in the semifinals after leading them for most of the way.
It’s a watershed moment for a program that has spent a few years in the brambles, finishing with a losing record every year from 2014 through 2018 — a rough patch that saw them slide from SDS Division II all the way down to Division V.
The team entered this season bound and determined to prove they didn’t belong at the bottom of the barrel with a bunch of low-enrollment schools, and by all accounts they have succeeded.
Their win over the Lions gives them a record of 18-12, a record achieved primarily against their normal regular season slate of schools in Divisions I-IV — no pygmy hunting necessary.
Set alongside Liberty Charter, the Eagles looked a like cut above.
Outside of a desultory first quarter — in which the two schools combined for a whopping eight travels (plus one double-dribble) against four made field goals — the game played out like the “World According to Southwest”.
The Eagles largely dictated pace of play and spent much of the evening up by double digits.
They had a tremendous advantage in depth — something head coach Enrique Cervantes identified over the weekend — with nine reserves to Liberty Charter’s two and they leveraged their ability to cycle in fresh bodies to the max.
“On Saturday, I told my assistant coaches — ’cause we didn’t know nothing about this team. All we’d seen was a video on YouTube of them playing against Mountain Empire — I told them, ‘We’re gonna pressure, full-court pressure, all night long. They only have seven girls, so we’re gonna tire them out, and see what happens.’ And that’s exactly what happened,” said Cervantes.
Southwest started to pull away in the second, after the sloppy first left them in a 7-7 tie.
They went on a 10-2 run to start the frame, getting threes from guards Kaeden Toves and Sydney Garcia, and twice forcing turnovers on inbounds after made baskets.
Star post-presence Andrea Aguilar also got going, scoring eight points and doing her usually vacuum-cleaner impression on the boards.
By halftime the Eagles were up 27-16, and the Lions were running ragged.
After the break Liberty Charter decided to counter the Eagles’ press with a more aggressive trapping version.
It didn’t lead to too many turnovers, but it did take the Eagles out of the their rhythm for a while, before they centered themselves and started finding some points on runouts, expanding their lead even further to 46-32 by the end of the third.
In the heightened extrasensory atmosphere of the playoffs a 14-point lead can feel a lot smaller, and the Lions tried their best to make the Eagles feel wobbly in the fourth, but even though they managed to claw their way back within 10, it never really felt like Southwest was going anywhere but on to the next round. They never stopped giving it their 110 percent.
Aguilar (who finished with 24 points, 16 boards and four steals) and fellow forward Dianne Burke frequently won rebounds over three or four Lions and every loose ball on the perimeter was a scrum.
They wanted the win, and they got it.
“The work ethic. That’s been the difference (between this year and years past),” said Coach Cervantes, speaking after the game, “A lot of [the players] committed over the summer and the fall, and they were out here working — even though they were in other sports — they would at least come for at least half an hour or an hour and shoot around or lift weights.
“All of us set goals for ourselves as a team back in November and a CIF championship was one of the goals, and for them to stay hungry all season — wanting this, working hard on this — and to see … [us] at the dance now … it’s been awesome.”
Burke, a senior, felt extremely gratified the effort the team has put in to get here has paid off.
“Honestly, I’m just happy that all the work we’ve done is paying off and everyone that doubted us, we’re proving them wrong,” she said. “We started from the bottom, you know — losses and losses and losses — (but) we had a positive attitude the whole time (and) we learned to be a family, which helped a lot. We’re sisters now.
“We haven’t stopped playing. I haven’t stopped playing since last spring. We all try to take our opportunities to play fall ball [and] just keep playing and playing, that’s how you get better. [Being in the final] means the world to us.”