Española, Pojoaque Valley ousted
Lady Sundevils swept while Elkettes fight to five games
RIO RANCHO — If the annual high school State Volleyball Tournament is anything, it’s the living embodiment of “What have you done for me lately?”
The great equalizer in this 12-team event, being held this weekend at the Santa Ana Star Center in what will eventually become the center of downtown Rio Rancho, is the very nature of the singleelimination bracket that gets its structure from a round-robin pool play event held on the first day of the tournament.
Whereas every other team sport under the purview of the New Mexico Activities Association follows a strict seeding-and-selection criteria to build a bracket that evenly distributes the top seeds, pool play takes into consideration the seeds — then throws them into a blender until it spits out something resembling a new species.
Take, for example, the Class 4A bracket that housed four of the top five seeds on one side and five teams seeded No. 6 or lower on the other. For those unlucky enough to be on the top-heavy side (see: Los Alamos), the road to the later stages was brutal.
For those on the other side, it was no cakewalk. The quality of the teams is just as evenly distributed on their part of the bracket, so the going is just as challenging.
As Española Valley head coach Damon Salazar put it after getting his 11th-seeded Lady Sundevils through pool play and then past No. 3 Artesia in Thursday’s opening round, the teams have a way of working these things out themselves.
“It’s an impossible job for the NMAA,” he said when asked about the seeding process. “They usually get all the right teams in and then we kind of reshuffle ourselves. I think it ends up being fair.”
The Lady Sundevils were swept aside in Friday’s quarterfinals by No. 8 Santa Teresa, losing 25-14, 25-20, 25-17 in a match that really wasn’t all that close in two of the three games.
Santa Teresa moved into Friday night’s semifinals where it met No. 9 Los Lunas, a rare 8-9 final four matchup that was made possible when the Lady Tigers eliminated Pojoaque Valley, the sixth seed, in five games; 18-25, 25-19, 25-14, 16-25, 15-8.
Pojoaque started off the fifth game in nightmarish fashion, falling behind 8-1 and never seriously threatening from that point forward. The Elkettes got stuck in a bad serve-receive rotation to start the game, and by time they got through it, the damage was done.
Head coach Joseph Rodriguez said bouncing back from a huge hole isn’t all that tough when it’s a game to 25. In the deciding fifth, the 15-point limit is a killer.
“To 25 it’s easy,” he said. “To 15 you’re [out of luck]. In volleyball if you hit 12, usually the odds are against you. Who hits 12 first is going to win the game when it gets to five [games].”
Los Lunas senior Alyssa Baca had two aces in the initial run while hitter Samantha Lente delivered kills in both the traditional spike-in-your-face manner and the touch lob over the front line style.
Pojoaque did manage to get as close as 9-5 on a kill down the line by Camille Cordova, but Los Lunas responded with three unanswered points to seize control and get to that magical 12-point barrier.
The match ended on a long volley that produced a shot by Baca that was blocked out of bounds by Pojoaque’s front line. It sent the Elkettes into a post match huddle with Rodriguez, a number of the girls wiping away tears as their coach spoke.
“It was a season of all highs,” Rodriguez said, speaking of his players’ all-district honors and the team’s win output almost doubling last year’s.
As for what could have been, an all-North semifinal with district rivals Pojoaque and Española squaring off for what would have been the third time, Salazar said it’s all part of the process when you’re dealing with the State Volleyball Tournament. Seeds mean nothing, and that has him standing in agreement with the way the system works.
“I do, because I don’t think they know how to seed people right now,” he said. “It’s not [the NMAA’s] fault.
“It’s just too hard.”