Fall sports All-Star rosters announced
The month of June is a long way out still, but the New Mexico High School Coaches Association has gotten to work and released the 2020 North-South All-Star rosters for the sports that took place in the fall of 2019.
However, the biggest news may not be about the athletes who were fortunate enough to be selected on Jan. 14, but more so about where they will be competing at.
The games for all sports will not be held in The Duke City this summer, as Albuquerque is being replaced with Las Cruces.
NMHSCA Executive Director Buster Mabrey — the man with answers to everything All-Star related — did not return phone calls, voicemails or text messages for comment. NMHSCA President Willie Owens said he could not accurately answer questions regarding the All-Star series, but he did have one thought on the change of location.
“It’s always in Albuquerque and hasn’t been in the south for nearly 10 years,” Owens said. “We’d always get that complaint from the people in the south, ‘It’s like, why do we always have to go to Albuquerque?’ It’s a legitimate complaint. So, after 10 years of not hosting it down there, it was just kind of unfair; in fact, we even talked about bringing it to Farmington one of these years.”
Another change is the abandonment of the four geographical location format. Last summer, the NMHSCA increased the number of teams in basketball, volleyball, softball and baseball, as squads were comprised from the Northwest, Northeast, Southwest and Southeast for both large and small schools.
Now, there will be just eight total teams, both Large-School and Small-School boys and girls for the North and South.
The sport of football will remain stagnant with just two games, those being Large-School and Small-School North and South. Soccer will just have one game apiece for boys and girls.
All the North-South games will be held June 4-6. The locations of the games will vary from Mayfield, Las Cruces and Centennial high schools, as well as the Field of Dreams baseball, softball, football and soccer fields.
In the past few seasons it had seemed like a foregone conclusion the Escalante High School football team would have a slew of players selected, but Ruben Serrano was the lone Lobo chosen for the North Small-School team.
The 5-foot-8, 135-pound Serrano played receiver and defensive end for Escalante this past season, and he was awarded a spot on the North’s defense. In nine games played, Serrano tallied 71 total tackles — second on the team — four-and-a-half sacks and also recorded two fumble recoveries.
Locally in volleyball, Dulce High School’s Caitlin Duncan and Peñasco High School’s Carly Gonzales were selected to the North Small-School and Pojoaque Valley High School middle Ashten Martinez was chosen for the North Large-School.
Martinez, a second-team all-stater, was one of two players on the roster who were not from Albuquerque and Santa Fe city based schools; the other was first-team all-state selection middle Natalie Gallegos from Los Alamos High School.
Dulce’s powerful hitter in Duncan was a first-team all-state selection in both 2018 and 2019.
No girls or boys soccer players from Pojoaque made the cut, and Los Alamos’ Alyssa Parker was the lone player selected from District 2-4A.