Lady Panthers’ Gonzales excels in two sports
ALBUQUERQUE — Carly Gonzales has a confession to make. Running? She’s not a big fan. Hated it, in fact. She didn’t like the grind of getting outside and disappearing on a trail for dozens of minutes at a time, of not having anyone to talk to or the price her body paid for pounding the pavement for long stretches at a time.
It helped that she found a little motivation along the way, the kind that led her to both a team and individual state championship as a cross-country runner for Peñasco High School last fall. She finished first in the small-school state meet in November, posting a time of 20 minutes, 36.55 seconds to lead the Lady Panthers to the blue trophy.
She followed that with a long season of basketball. Seven of the eight girls on the cross-country team — Gonzales, Martina Tafoya, Maricela MacAuley, Estrella Gonzalez, Adriana Tafoya, Jennifer Aguilar and Ariana MacAuley — went on to play hoops, taking a champions’ mentality to a sport that was clearly on the rise.
Last season the Lady Panthers started as the top-ranked undefeated basketball team in 2A. They stumbled down the stretch and bowed out early in the playoffs, but head coach Gilbert Mascarenas knew he had something special when he took one look at the girls who dominated cross-country.
They developed a winner’s approach and understood what it took to go all the way. Still, there were some drawbacks. As much endurance as the girls had, it wasn’t necessarily a seamless transition to basketball.
“Me, personally, I think that crosscountry and basketball, it’s a differ-
ent kind of conditioning,” Mascarenas said. “Cross-country ,you just go and get a base, get a good pace and finish up ahead. Basketball, it’s a lot of stop and go, stop and go, speed it up.”
Gonzales said all the running didn’t suit her. At least not at first.
With a state title to her credit and the expectation that perhaps more are to come in her final two years of high school, she’s taking a different tack nowadays.
“No, I’m starting to enjoy it,” she said after Friday night’s loss in the Class 2A state championship game in The Pit.
She cited encouraging text messages she’d get from her older sister, not to mention the success she and her teammates shared last fall as reasons for the change in attraction for the sport.
“I think we always encourage each other to do something new,” she said. “My sister, she encouraged me for every sport.”
That includes the spring sports like track and softball.
In a town as small as Peñasco and a school as little as the Lady Panthers have, there’s no such thing as athletes sticking to just one sport — or one way of life.
Mascarenas said a number of the girls ride a bus every day to Española to attend college prep classes at Northern New Mexico College, then head back to town to finish the day at high school and join whatever team they might be a part of.
When it’s all said and done, the dual sport approach is paying dividends in ways that make the basketball team’s run possible.
“It definitely is a factor with, like, Carly,” Mascarenas said. “She keeps going. State champ, but she keeps going.”