Marauders boys fall in Valley final
The hunt for a Valley title came to a frustrating end for the Monache High School boys team after the secondseeded Marauders fell 16-10 to the top-seeded Rams of Garces Memorial on Thursday in the CIF Central Section Division II championship game in Bakersfield.
Monache (19-12, 5-3 EYL) awaits to hear if they will move on to the CIF Regional Championship tournament. Brackets for the tournament will be made available Sunday evening according to the CIF State website.
Following the loss and in the final seconds of the game, there were tears shed by some Marauders, but despite the final score MHS head coach Evan Thomas made it clear to his team that he was proud of them.
“I just told them that just because we didn’t win tonight, this has been a successful season,” Thomas said. “I was very proud of all my boys this year, they did a good job.”
Garces (27-6, 5-3) and Monache were very familiar to each other with Marauders entering the game with a 2-1 record over the Rams after beating them once in a tournament and at home in an East Yosemite League game. The two teams tied for second in EYL, with Monache only losing to Garces on the road in the first round of EYL.
“Garces is one of the only pools in the Valley that has home field advantage,” Thomas said. “You know they play music during every little break that they can, and their fans sit so close. They’re really the only pool like this so I knew coming in that was going to be a big factor.”
Less than two minutes into the game Monache jumped out to a 2-0 lead after Garrett Keller scored off an assist from Danan Weisenberger and a Marauders steal led to a Nick Taylor goal on a fast break. But four goals from the Rams, three of them from Grayden Reynolds in the hole set position put Garces on top where they stayed for the rest of the game.
In the final minute of the first quarter Keller scored his final goal of the game to cut the lead to one, but another score from Reynolds on a 5-meter with 36 seconds gave the Rams a 5-3 lead to end the quarter. Reynolds finished with a game-high eight goals.
“I thought we played well,” Thomas said. “I thought we made a few dumb mistakes. But that happens every game. We didn’t shut [Reynolds] down like we needed to. That was probably the biggest factor in the loss. But we played good, we just didn’t play great defense, that’s the only thing.”
Monache was outscored 4-2 in the second quarter, but with goals from, Weisenberger, Taylor and Oliver Camarena the Marauders outscored the Rams 3-2 and cut Garces’ lead to 11-8.
Two goals from Garces extended the Rams lead to 13-8, but Monache kept fighting and answered with a close goal from Camarena off an assist from Keller.
Garces’ Lee Begin scored two goals to push the Rams to a six-goal lead. The Marauders Xavier Palacios scored the team’s final goal on a man-up situation with 3 minutes left while Reynolds scored the Rams final goal at the 2-minute mark.
“We scored 10 goals which is pretty much
our average in every game, but usually we hold teams under seven,” Thomas said. “So we let them score 16, that’s a little much for us. So those two things. Not shutting down their big guy in the middle and just defense as a whole, kind of let us down tonight.”
For the Marauders, goalie Brock Fleischman finished with seven blocks. Taylor had three goals and two assists, while Keller tallied two goals and two assists. Alongside his two goals, Camarena also had one steal. Weisenberger had two goals, two steals and one assist. JT Lee recorded one steal and one field block. Palacios had one goal and Ian Azevedo also had one assist.