Lady Braves keep getting better
Santa Fe Indian School riding 13-game winning streak as it heads into state quarterfinals
The goal of every basketball team is to be better at the end of the season than they were at the beginning.
At Santa Fe Indian School, it’s practically a requirement.
Most prep programs have the advantage of working through the summer, via summer scrimmages, open gyms and offseason workouts, to get ready for “next year.” That doesn’t really happen at the boarding school with either their boys or girls programs. Players often are left to their own devices while school is out, so the Braves and Lady Braves are already behind the learning curve when they congregate for the start of preseason practice.
What starts off as a problem sometimes ends up being a boon. Take this season for example.
The Lady Braves of SFIS (24-4) are playing their best ball heading into their Class 4A quarterfinal game against Moriarty with a 13-game winning streak, but they don’t feel like they’ve hit their peak — yet. SFIS, the six seed in the tournament, takes on the No. 3 Lady Pintos (25-4) at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday in a rematch of its most notable win of the season, by a 53-38 count on Feb. 9.
“I think we’re one game away,” SFIS head coach Christie Abeyta said after her team’s hard-fought 61-56 win over Socorro in the opening round Friday. “[Friday] was the wake-up call because what really hurt us this particular season was our strength of schedule.”
While the Lady Braves have played the top three seeds in the tournament — No. 1 Portales, No. 2 Las Vegas Robertson at No. 3 Moriarty — that was offset by a weak District 5-4A schedule. Only Albuquerque Bosque School reached double figures in wins, while the Bernalillo, Albuquerque Sandia Prep and East Mountain combined for just 17 wins among them. So it should be no shock that SFIS’ winning streak coincided with that portion of the season, but its win over Moriarty is a part of that streak, too.
More notable, though, is that the Lady Braves are 14-1 since the turn of the calendar, with their only loss at Las Vegas Robertson (6441) on Jan. 11. That merely points
out to the fact that they have gradually improved throughout the season — perhaps more so than any other team in the state.
“I think we’ve really matured throughout the season,” junior forward Leanna Lewis said. “There are a few of us who play together in the summer, but it’s not like it’s the whole school team. So it really takes us a while to mature together as a group.”
Mixed in to that maturation
process is that SFIS had to wait for Leanna and Camilla Lewis, its two starting forwards, to finish the volleyball season, which didn’t end until a loss in the 4A quarterfinals in mid-November. Even though it won its Lady Braves Classic to start December and started off 6-1, SFIS followed that with consecutive losses to Portales and Taos to make it 0-3 against 4A competition.
The Taos loss was especially
perplexing because it came off a tough loss to the Lady Rams in which the Lady Braves battled back from an 18-3 deficit to make it a game. What frustrated Abeyta more, though, was a nondistrict schedule that was littered with 3A and 2A schools (six in all).
“Maybe a game against Pojoaque would have been good, or another game with somebody
that is at that same level,” Abeyta said. “When you have the kind of schedule we had and are beating people up like we have, for us, it didn’t prepare us like we needed for those pressure situations.”
It made the win over Moriarty all the more important because it came against a team that was ranked in the top three at the time. Thanks to the defense of Iris Emery, the Lady Braves held Lady Pintos forward Alyssa Adams to just 11 points.
“It was really impressive,” SFIS sophomore guard Hunter Garcia said. “When we’re in sync, our defense was really, really good.”
Still, there are areas in need of improvement. In the win over the Lady Warriors, SFIS struggled against their trap and turned the ball over 26 times. Sixteen of those came in the second half as Socorro cut a 31-17 deficit to 56-55 in the final minute of play.
It took the free-throw shooting of Leanna Lewis (4-for-4 in the final 45 seconds) to hold on to the win, but all that mattered was getting the “W.” It brought Abeyta to mind something her dad, former SFIS head boys coach Francis L. Abeyta, told her.
“My dad used to tell me, ‘Sometimes, it’s better to be lucky than good,’ ” Abeyta said.
At least the Lady Braves are becoming good at the right time.