The Montezuma-Cortez Lady Panthers’ 2015-2016 season came to an end on Tuesday night at Alamosa High School in the opening round of the Intermountain league district tournament.
The Panthers and the Mean Moose were in a defensive stalemate for the first half. M-CHS was the only team to score in the first quarter, and they began the second leading 2-0.
Panthers head coach John McHenry said that his team’s defensive presence had the Alamosa guards frustrated, and that the Mean Moose responded by pressuring the M-CHS the length of the court.
The two teams continued to struggle to tally points in the second quarter, and M-CHS went into halftime with a 9-8 lead.
“It wasn’t a very pretty game,” McHenry said chuckling. “I mean, we weren’t burning the nets up, that’s for sure.”
Alamosa spread the Panthers’ 2-3 zone in the second half and turned up their pressure on defense to outscore M-CHS 12-4 in the third quarter.
Then in the fourth, the Mean Moose used a 14-8 advantage to pull away with a 34-21 victory.
“We just made a lot of turnovers,” McHenry said of his team’s second-half play. “If we could’ve eliminated turnovers we definitely would’ve come out on top.”
The loss ends the Lady Panthers’ season, finishing with an 8-12 record.
The Lady Panthers jumped out to an early 5-0 record and a first place finish in the Meeker tournament to start the season, before finishing the season 3-12.
McHenry was disappointed with the finish after such a great start, but he noted that injuries had an affect on the team, and then explained how the Panthers’ difficult Intermountain league schedule will be even more beneficial next season when playoff spots are determined by strength of schedule.
Next year, playoff entrants and seedings will be determined by RPI (Ratings Percentage Index), which is based on a combination of winning percentage, opponents’ winning percentage and common opponents’ winning percentage.
Had the Class 3A playoff positions been determined by RPI this year, five teams from the Intermountain league would have made the postseason – with M-CHS at No. 20 – and three teams in the top ten: Pagosa Springs (No. 1), Centauri (No. 3) and Monte Vista (No. 6).
M-CHS will graduate eight seniors this spring, and while McHenry is sad to see them go, he is proud of all they’ve accomplished.
“I’ve been here at M-CHS for three years, and this is the group that I came in with,” he said. “They were really young, and in fact, we could barely make a varsity team. This was a group that was really raw and we finally came together and made a team out of it.”
“They came together as a group and believed in each other,” he continued. “And they knew what each one of them had to offer the game.”
