Cibola eliminates Lady Cats

Throughout the regular season, many Class 5A girls basketball head coaches predicted that the postseason would be wide open. On Tuesday, it was third-seeded Clovis who found out first that the speculation was true.

In the first 5A game of the day at Santa Ana Star Center in Rio Rancho, the third-seeded Wildcats were taken out by Cibola 60-52 in the quarterfinal round.

First-year Clovis coach Jeff Reed saw the season end for his team after the 11th-seeded Cougars rolled to an early 29-12 advantage and then held on down the stretch of the foul-plagued final quarter.

Although Cibola had four starters end up fouling out, Clovis (24-5) was unable to rally from the early deficit. That was partly due to the Wildcats’ 50-percent free throw shooting (17-for-34) and because Clovis had three of its starters foul out before it was over.

Before all that happened, however, Clovis found itself encountering matchup difficulties with the Cougars as 6-foot-3 center Zalika Dyson limited leading scorer Antiesha Brown’s effectiveness.

Brown did end up leading the Wildcats with 20 points, but only seven in the first half as Cibola got out to its 17-point lead.

“Usually, when you see a big girl, you think they’re pretty slow. But she was a pretty good defender,” Brown said. “I kind of underestimated that.”

“Zalika might be six-foot-three, but she’s got a seven-foot reach,” Cibola coach Lori Stephenson said. “She got five blocks in Las Cruces (in the opening round) and she wasn’t swatting at stuff.”

The Cougars defensive prowess didn’t stop with Dyson.

Six-foot junior Korina Chapman and athletic sophomore Amber Battle, who blocked a couple of Clovis perimeter shots in the first half, also kept the Wildcats from getting their offense in gear.

“I think at the beginning of the game, it was a little bit of a factor. We had a little shock,” said Brittany Johnson of Cibola’s height advantage. “I don’t think it was in the second half. We kind of dug ourselves a hole, we miss 17 free throws — that’s the game right there.”

Clovis cut the margin to seven points on a pair of Brown free throws with 2:09 remaining. But Brown fouled out a short time later while reaching for a backcourt Cibola pass and it took almost another minute before Clovis was able to slice another point off the margin — when Jadee Isler converted a three-point play to make the score 55-49.

Dyson, Battle, Chapman and Andi Buckel, who scored 12 points, all exited with five fouls for Cibola. Johnson and Leia Willis also fouled out for Clovis.

Johnson finished with 14 points for the ‘Cats while Ashlee Pierson and Isler scored eight and seven respectively.

Reed said that Cibola’s height wasn’t only a problem for the Clovis halfcourt offense. The Wildcats’ full-court press, often a source of easy buckets for Clovis, was also affected.

“We knew we’d probably have to get out of it and we did. We got into another zone press just to be able to counter that mismatch problem. They’ve got two or three big girls and that was tough,” Reed said. “We came out a little sluggish and they came out on fire at the beginning.

“But we could’ve laid down and died in the second half and I’m so proud of the girls because they fought all the way to the very end,” he added. “I couldn’t ask for anything more about the fight and the hustle. We’ve been a fourth-quarter team all year and I thought we were going to make a run and get them. And we would’ve — if we had hit some free throws.”