Pojoaque Valley ready to cash in on potential
Elkettes now realizing their potential, ready to make a longer run at state
When veteran basketball coach Seledon Martinez took over the reins at Pojoaque Valley High school three years ago, he saw a team with plenty of potential.
But, oh, that word potential is a loaded one, especially for this group of Elkettes, who were a collection of players with raw but untapped ability, a team that was undisciplined in terms of basketball acumen.
Fast forward to this season and Pojoaque is a force that is realizing its potential and playing to the vision that Martinez envisioned. The Elkettes racked up a 4-0 start as they headed into Thursday’s tough match-up with St. Pius in the Alice King Invitational in Moriarty.
“When I took over the team a couple of years ago, I had a plan in mind,” Martinez said. “The girls that I have up there right now, they were the faces of the plan, the foundations. I have some height. I have some speed. I have some quickness. We can shoot from outside. It’s just a total team that I envisioned.”
The squad is built around the three senior leaders: Dallas Archibald, Shania Thronas and Hailey Ortiz, but it’s also a true squad that gets contributions up and down the roster, Martinez said. “The 10-11 girls are solid,” he said. “They all bring something unique to the table. We got off on a good run, and the girls felt the momentum and have kept it going. We haven’t really been tested yet.”
A year after bowing out of the state tournament in a first-round loss to Portales, the Elkettes check in as the sixth-ranked team in the most recent NMOTSC.com Class 4A coaches poll.
“Two years ago, the girls wanted to run and fast break,” Martinez said. “We weren’t ready. We could run back and forth, but we couldn’t get a shot. We had to slow it down and run our offense. We’ve been working on our passing and getting the pass to where it’s supposed to get to, and catching the ball and driving to the hoop.”
It took some time as the group matured.
“It’s taken them a while to understand that, yeah, we want to run, but controlled … and we have to get something out of it when we do run,” Martinez said. “We’re doing better. We still need a lot of work. We’re winning and that’s what matters. The girls are happy and putting in hard work.”
The players themselves said they understood they would have to undergo a learning process.
“At the beginning, we started off rocky, our momentum and our way of doing things wasn’t the right way,” Archibald said. “Last year, we got pretty close to where wanted. This year, we’ve gotten even closer to where we want, but we’re still not there yet.”
It was a matter of coming together as a team,” she said.
“It’s been our chemistry and we learned how to read each other and trust one another,” Archibald said. Thronas agrees.
“It’s been really a team effort between all of us,” she said. “We’ve really, I think we’re to the point to where we can run. We try to play as a team and trust each other, and have fun playing the game and running the ball. We have the chemistry on the team where we pretty much know how each other plays and where they like the ball, and where to shoot.”
And now that the team has some state playoff experience, they’re ready to make a longer run, Thronas said.
“We had fun, and it was sad that we lost and our season ended like that,” she said. “But it helps us by preparing for us to go further into the state tournament. That was a rough game. We kind of got our feet wet in the state tournament level. Now we know where we’re going to go into the future.”