Turnaround season to be tested
Raiders sneak into playoffs, face No. 1 Mountain Pointe tonight
For the eighth time in 11 seasons, the Cibola football team is in the state playoffs.
But this year’s route to the 16-team 6A field — and a first-round date with topranked Mountain Pointe in Phoenix tonight — was a little different than many of those past years.
This year, Cibola started the season 0-3 for the first time since 2003, current coach Lucky Arvizo’s second year at the helm. And not only that, none of those three losses were close — 43-7 to Horizon, 55-14 to Imperial (Calif.) and 41-0 at Southwest
(Calif.).
At that point, it seemed fair to wonder if the Raiders’ stranglehold on the Yuma Union High School District title — which they had won six of the past seven seasons — was in serious jeopardy, much less their chances of qualifying for state.
Yet here the Raiders (5-5 overall) are, fresh off three straight wins and a 2815 triumph at Tucson High in the 6A Southern region championship game.
“We did face quite a bit of adversity at the beginning of the season, and I’m just really proud of these guys for really continuing to try to improve every week and really believing in what we were trying to accomplish throughout the season,” Arvizo said. “There’s a lot of situations where maybe a team just gives up after going through the first half of the season and some of the games that we had, but they continued to believe in each other and came out and did wonders.”
The Raiders are 5-2 over their last seven games, a stretch that began with a 37-20 victory over Gila Ridge back on Sept. 8. They hung on to beat Kofa, 3633, about a month later to earn a spot in the 6A Southern region title game, and concluded YUHSD play with a 51-14 victory over Yuma High two weeks ago.
Personnel-wise, the biggest change
during that stretch was the addition of senior running back Jesse Escott, who missed the first three games of the season but has since had seven straight 100-plus-yard rushing performances.
Escott enters tonight’s game with 1,071 yards and 14 touchdowns on 194 carries this season.
His emergence has taken some of the pressure off of Cibola’s other star playmaker, junior receiver Gabriel Ramirez, who’s caught 50 passes for 939 yards and 12 touchdowns.
“We had a real young team, not much experience, so we were trying to place players in positions depending on what we had,” Arvizo said. “When we had Jesse back, we could put guys in other positions that would help us knowing that we had the running back and a stable running game.”
Arvizo cited the offensive line’s improvement — which was slow to develop due to some early-season injuries — as another key to the offense’s success of late.
And of course, there’s the Raiders’ defense, which had arguably its best showing of the season in last week’s region championship game.
“Within the last three games there’s been leaps and bounds of improvement,” Arvizo said of the team as a whole. “Especially in the region championship, they really came out and played outstanding. Offense, defense and special teams; they stuck to their assignments, they communicated on
the field and they really focused on the game.”
Arvizo said that last week’s performance should give the team confidence heading into to tonight — while fully acknowledging that the task at hand is daunting to say the least.
Mountain Pointe (8-2 overall) is a traditional Arizona power, with a number of Division I prospects on its roster. And when the Raiders have faced traditional powers in the past, it hasn’t gone well — in their last three times facing a No. 1 or No. 2 seed in the state playoffs, they’ve lost by an average of 43.3 points.
“What I told the guys is just breaking it down play by play,” Arvizo said. “Each play you’ve got to look at as a small battle. Obviously playing the number one team, are you going to win all the battles? Absolutely not. But if you kind of break the game down a little bit per play, and then at the end of the quarter or end of a the series we see how we do.”
Offensively, the goal is to control the ball and the clock. Defensively, it’s to limit the big plays and make Mountain Pointe earn its scores.
But regardless of how the game goes, that Cibola is in this position is what’s most noteworthy.
“They do a lot of things well, they have a lot of athletes,” Arvizo said. “But we have our game plan going in, so we’re just excited to go up there and play football.”