Putting a bow on prep state basketball
Some firsts, some familiar faces, some joy, some sadness
The first day of spring, officially, is Tuesday. Unofficially, it begins once the high school basketball season ends. Let’s put a ribbon on the week that was.
KUDOS: First, congratulations to the 10 state champions.
It’s always great to welcome first-timers to the club, and we had two on Saturday — Navajo Prep (Class 3A boys) and the Academy for Technology and the Classics (2A boys).
The Fort Sumner/House co-op captured the 1A boys title for the second straight year. The Foxes also were one of two schools to sweep state in both genders, the other being 3A Navajo Prep.
Two teams that lost in the final in 2023 got redemption. Those are the ATC boys and the Kirtland Central girls. Three others — the Volcano Vista girls, the Robertson boys and the Magdalena boys — suffered their second straight loss in the title game.
By seed, the Peñasco girls, a 6, were the longest shot to hoist a blue trophy. Four No. 1s captured a title, along with three No. 2s, one 3, one 4 and Peñasco.
The Pecos boys, a 7, were the highest seed to play in a final.
And two of the state champions, Kirtland Central and Sandia’s girls, both featured huge contributions from an eighth-grader.
Allyson Tsosie of the Broncos is already immensely popular with the Kirtland fans (and should be; she’s an amazing young talent) and Kaiyah Benally of the Matadors, a prodigy like her older sister Sydney, played a crucial role in Sandia’s run.
IT’S ALWAYS SOMETHING: Now that Volcano Vista’s boys have done something no one’s done before, it’s time to mention the next task in front of the Hawks.
Three straight titles for a boys program from Albuquerque in the large division is unprecedented. Next in the Hawks’ crosshairs: The Hobbs Eagles. Volcano Vista, with its top two players back for 2024-25, is going to have an excellent chance at tying the modern-day record for consecutive state championships. The Eagles won four in a row from 1999-2002. Meanwhile, one of the less talked about aspects of Volcano Vista’s three-peat is that coach Greg Brown has now won three in a row as both a player and a coach.
Which puts him in very exclusive company. Truthfully, I can’t say if anyone else belongs to this club.
But was it harder to win three in a row as a player or a coach?
“Harder as a coach,” Brown said. The family also picked up rings for three of the next generation of Browns, as Hudson and Houston play for their father at Volcano Vista, and Chloe Brown won a ring with Sandia’s girls.
RETROSPECTING: One of the more emotional scenes on championship Saturday was Sandia girls coach Lee Kettig, bent over, hands on knees, after his Matadors beat Volcano Vista in the 5A girls final.
There was a reason to partially explain this.
He spoke on Sunday about the deaths of several people in his life over the last couple of years who were close to him, and the emotional and mental toll it took on his life and his career. This dates back to last season, when, in distress about these deaths, he took a brief leave of absence from his duties at Sandia.
Kettig had lost his mother, who passed away during the pandemic, and, more recently, two of his best friends on the Sandia High faculty.
“It left me in a place of grief and sadness, and angry about losing people,” Kettig said.
But this 2023-24 Sandia team provided a galvanizing sense of purpose, he said.
“To be able to gather myself over the summer, to reset and to go on this journey with these girls, starting in August,” Kettig said, “was just really satisfying.”
BEEN THERE, DUNN THAT: If you were sitting on the Pit floor during the two days of championship games, maybe you noticed the silhouette of a very tall woman standing at center court at the top of the arena before the 5 p.m. Friday Class 2A final between Peñasco and Tularosa.
Turns out that person was Corona High’s highly touted 6-foot-6 freshman Harper Dunn. And she was doing the color commentary for the NFHS Network on that game.
“It was awesome. I had a great time!” Dunn said.
ProView Networks, which is based in Albuquerque, provides the broadcasting crews for the state tournament games, which are broadcast over the NFHS Network. Steve Davis, who runs ProView, asked Harper, who is interested in sports broadcasting, to be on a crew. Dunn earlier this season had appeared on a Podcast called “Road to the Pit” hosted by Ed and Nick Nuñez, who both do games for ProView during the season.
Dunn said she hopes to do more playoff games next year, if possible.
STATUS QUO? STATUS NO: Devon Manning, the coach of the Kirtland Central girls, said after last season’s title-game loss to Gallup that he felt he needed to shake some things up.
Changes, he said, needed to be made, in how he coached and, in general, how best to approach his job.
“I had to change how I coached a little bit,” he said after the Broncos’ 21st title, achieved last Friday against St. Pius. “I tried to be a little more in the moment, and not dwelling on past mistakes. I call it neutral thinking. I just tried to be in the moment.”
But he also had an idea about keeping all his players on the same page, to create a larger culture of one-ness. And his players were not initially on board with this, Manning said with a smile.
“I made them wear the same-color socks all year,” he said. “They didn’t like that.”
PREP WORK: The Navajo Prep Eagles, along their road to a boys championship, not long ago decided to craft an obstacle-laden schedule that would, in theory, pay off in March at the Pit.
The Eagles’ four losses this season? Valley, Hope Christian,
Clovis, Las Cruces. All teams in larger classes.
Navajo Prep beat 4A state champ Highland at the Rio Rancho tournament in late December, and it also entered Clovis’ tournament, in the belief that matching up with such teams would provide an edge in the postseason.
“It’s huge,” Eagles coach Matt Melvin said “The last couple of years, we learned a lot about what it takes to get to this point and what it takes to get over the hump. … That was our mission, to have the best strength of schedule we could.”
And so we make our annual bittersweet goodbye to prep basketball season. In eight or so months, there’ll be a new one. And new memories.