Tigers eyeing jump to next level
4A contender has higher aspirations than previous seasons’ first-round exits
He stops short of calling it a come-to-Jesus meeting, but the gathering Taos head coach Art Abreu Jr. had with his football team in November was as close as he’d like to come to having one.
The Tigers had just been booted from the Class 4A playoffs with a 36-point loss at Ruidoso, their second straight first-round postseason exit. Despite fielding one of the youngest rosters in the state, Abreu wasn’t satisfied.
He knew his team had another gear. They just hadn’t found it yet.
“With the players we had in that locker room and knowing what kind of talent we had coming back, we had to sit down and talk about what kind of team we were going to be,” he said. “Getting to the playoffs two years in a row is nice. I mean, the history of this team — two years in a row is good. What I wanted to see is if they thought they could be more; more than a team that lost in the first round every year.” The Tigers lose only four seniors from last year’s team. What returns is a group loaded with size and experience — and chemistry.
“We pretty much know each other’s thoughts by now,” said Shane Martinez, a senior who anchors a line that returns all but one starter on both sides of the ball.
The girth up front comes with a few added wrinkles, including a pair of offseason transfers that Abreu wants to keep secret. One of them is a 6-foot-4 edge pass rusher, a new student who moved to Taos from Louisiana.
“For the most part this is the same team we had last year so any new face is going to be noticed,” Abreu said.
A coach big on making things right in the locker room, he said that meeting last November has gone a long way for a team that has high expectations. Starting quarterback Jude Suazo agreed, saying the team no longer sees itself as a middle of the pack outfit.
“District championship, no doubt,” he said. “That’s what we’re going for. We know we can do it. We can be better than all of them.”
A 6-foot-5, 255-pound tackle, Martinez said the chemistry didn’t form overnight. It took two long years of development under Abreu, a former star player at Las Vegas Robertson and college tight end at New Mexico Highlands.
Now in his third year with Taos,
Abreu’s program has shown steady and consistent growth. Helping matters is Suazo, a 6-foot, 155-pound senior who earned his stripes the hard way by running for his life behind the same line that now appears to be a team strength.
“I look at guys like [Martinez] and, yeah, it’s a good feeling we’ll be able to protect and get some blocks,” he said.
Suazo will have a new running back in junior Jonathan Garcia, a lean 165-pounder who compliments Suazo’s run-pass threat.
True to Abreu’s roots, the Tigers will also have a couple of tight ends thrown into the mix. That includes 180-pound senior Santiago Cortez and a handful of others who fit the role with both size and experience.
Also true to Abreu’s roots; beef up front.
“We finally have the kind of size in there that makes me get a big smile on my face,” he said, looking to the end of the field where his linemen were engaged in a goal-line drill. “You can’t do anything without a good line and, yeah, I like what I see down there.”
TEAM NOTES
The Tigers will scrimmage Capital at home next Friday, giving them a look at all four Santa Fe teams. They have Santa Fe High, St. Michael’s and Santa Fe Indian School on the regular season schedule. … The opening two weeks are against Hatch Valley and Hope Christian — a pair of teams who handed them losses to start the 2016 campaign. Abreu is putting extra emphasis on the opening sequence because he knows a fast start will go a long way in giving his club a muchneeded confidence boost it lacked a year ago. … All eyes will be on Garcia at running back. He replaces the team’s most dynamic offensive threat from last season, since-graduated back Ryan McCarty. If Garcia produces, expect Suazo to put up big numbers as a run-pass threat.
Outlook: In one fell swoop the Tigers went from one of the youngest teams in 2-4A to the most experienced. That will serve them well in a district that includes perennial powers Las Vegas Robertson and St. Michael’s, not to mention the meteoric rise of West Las Vegas. Not coincidentally, the Tigers play all three in a 21-day span in the middle of the season, a stretch that will announce them as a contender or pretender. To make the leap from first-round fodder to a deep run, the offensive line needs to give Jude Suazo time to develop a reliable passing game. The return of Estevan Valerio (knee injury) at linebacker makes the defense better, but the overall key for this team is not settling for being a playoff team. The talent is there for a late November push. Now it’s time to show it.