Piedra Vista girls 17-1, but coach stresses district play
When is a 17-1 basketball team not a lock to qualify for a state basketball tournament?
That this question has merit to Piedra Vista girls coach Joe Reed is revealing.
“I’ve told them, ‘You can go 0-8 in district, and whether you were 17-1 or not (we could) still not make the state tournament,’ ” Reed said. “I’m trying to keep them hungry.”
The Panthers are both a fascinating and mysterious story. That 17-1 record is tied with Las Cruces for the best of any girls team in Class 6A. And yet Piedra Vista is a group no one knows much about — even in a season that, by games played, is already two-thirds complete.
“Not a lot of people know about us,” Reed said. And his team hasn’t received much love from fellow coaches, either, with the Panthers ranked only No. 7 in the latest top-10 poll.
After 14 straight wins — the only loss came to 5A power Bloomfield — Piedra Vista’s validity as a contender will be understood further in the coming weeks, as the Panthers enter District 1-6A action. First up? A visit from No. 4 Cibola on Friday night.
“They’ve been wanting a big game for a while now,” said Reed, 39, and in his fifth season as PV’s head coach. He is an Aztec native. “Now they’ve got their wish. … We’re gonna have to finish well in district for people to take us seriously.”
The Panthers don’t have a player who averages in double figures in points, and this has been largely a by-committee team, with solid input from any number of athletes, led by point guard Elaina Watson (who transferred in from Alaska with her sister, Celina, giving PV what Reed described as “6A speed we didn’t have last year), shooting guard Alexis Long, and veteran senior forwards Kristi Lee Bennie and Dani Russo.
Piedra Vista did make it to the Pit two years ago — but as a 5A program. Piedra Vista’s strong paper résumé in 2017-18 will now be put to some serious hard-court tests.
And while the Panthers have a couple of very attractive wins, here is something to remember: They haven’t been against any of 6A’s elite teams.
ENCORE: The Belen High boys are following up their terrific — if tumultuous — 2016-17 season quite respectably. The Eagles are 13-5 under first-year head coach Andrew Dunnell, who played for Greg Brown at Manzano (winning a state title in 2006) and mentored as a coach under Travis Julian, when Julian was coaching the Monarchs.
“I think to start the year,” said Dunnell, “there were high expectations, and it got to the kids. It weighed on them a little bit. It’s nice (now) to come out here and play and not have this burden on their chest.”
And while Belen got dumptrucked earlier last week by Española Valley, that doesn’t mean the Eagles won’t be a factor in March. They do have strong wins over what might be 4A’s two best teams — Bernalillo and Silver — and slim losses to strong 6A squads Atrisco Heritage and West Mesa.
Speaking of Greg Brown, the three boys head coaches in Valencia County all tied to him in one way or another.
Julian, now Los Lunas’ head man, was once an assistant to Brown at Manzano. Dunnell played for Brown at Manzano. Jake Herrin, Valencia’s head coach, coached with Brown at Volcano Vista and still commutes from Albuquerque into Tomé at least five days a week (translating to roughly 500 miles of work travel every week) and even pops into Volcano Vista for an occasional Hawks home game.
Dunnell was coaching with Alvin Broussard at Sandia before he landed at Valencia.
DWINDLING: It was not a good week to be an undefeated team. Four of the state’s unbeatens suffered their first loss since we visited seven days ago.
Bernalillo’s boys fell at Belen, Española Valley’s boys dropped a road game to Rio Rancho, Mescalero Apache’s girls lost to Fort Sumner/House, and the Las Cruces girls dropped a game to another top-five team in Carlsbad.
That leaves us with five undefeated teams: the Texico boys, the Tucumcari girls, the Magdalena boys, the Moriarty girls and the Las Cruces boys. THE OTHER CAMERON DIXON: Cibola’s outstanding shooting guard, senior Cameron Dixon, who first burst onto the scene for the Cougars when he was a freshman, has been largely out of action of late with an injury to his nonshooting (left) shoulder.
Which is a shame for all of us, since Dixon is arguably the best — and perhaps most exciting — 3-pointer shooter in Class 6A. No word when, or if, he will return.
Oddly enough, there are two basketball-playing Cameron Dixons in Albuquerque this season. The other — a girl — plays for La Cueva.