Lady Trojans win first-ever state championship
ALBUQUERQUE — With a shot heard around the north, Aayilah Boies’s 3-pointer with 2.7 seconds left in the game Friday night, gave the Mesa Vista girls basketball team its first-ever Class 2A state championship.
The shot capped a furious, fourth quarter comeback at The Pit that saw the top-seeded Lady Trojans erase a nine-point deficit in the final four minutes to beat No. 3 Tatum 49-47.
“I feel that this team, they trusted the process,” Mesa Vista coach Jesse Boies, who was pumping his fist with exhilaration after his daughter’s shot splashed through the net, said. “They believed. This is the toughest team I’ve ever had, mentally, physically and matching them up. It just feels amazing to bring it home to the north and to a community that deserves this. We’ve been through a lot in the last couple of years, and this is the start of a new chapter.”
Oh, but what a chapter, and all it took was a little, well a lot, of prayer at the end.
“It wasn’t the plan,” Aayilah Boies said. “But I just saw an opening, and I knew I had to score one way. I said, ‘Please God, if you want us to win… And I guess he did.”
She finished with 24 points to lead all scorers and had the prayers of her teammates to back her up.
“I was just praying to God that it went in and it did,” forward Aubrey Maestas, who finished with 11 points, said. “And I’m so glad that it did.”
As the shot dropped, The Pit that was filled with close to 10,000 fans, erupted in raucous noise.
“It was amazing to see,” Aayilah Boies said. “I was thinking all the North came together as one. And it was awesome to see all of them just cheering us on, whether it was our team or not their team.”
The Lady Coyotes had one last chance to get back in the game, but their half-court, in-bounds pass was tipped away and ended up in Boies’s hands and after one dribble, the horn sounded and the celebration began.
“You put in so much work, all of us,” Maestas said. “Every single one of us has just put in so much work and we wanted this for so long. I just can’t believe we finally did it. This isn’t for real.”
Mesa Vista (29-2) played a tough schedule in preparation for this moment and even had to pull out a few at the end like this one, which left the Lady Trojans well prepared for the moment, Jesse Boies said.
“We’ve been in this position, actually a few times this year, about three-four,” he said. “And they just knew we don’t stop. To beat us, our motto is it’s gonna take 32 minutes to beat us. Play us 32 minutes to the exact buzzer. And that’s the ability it takes to beat us. And you could see that at work (Friday).”
While it took a whole team effort to win, only two other Lady Trojans players scored, with Valery Martinez collecting eight points and eight rebounds, and Isabella Gallegos scoring six.
But five different Mesa Vista players had two steals as the team snared 11 overall and Jordyn Serrano grabbed eight boards with four blocks.
“We always have a thing that says it’s about us,” Jesse Boies said. “We don’t care about that other locker room. They’re going to have to adjust to us. And I think we kept that mentality throughout. We kind of faltered here and there, went cold and stuff, but we stuck to us. And once these girls realized, ‘Oh, it’s a minute left, and we’re running out of time, we’ve got to step up,’ we started playing us again, and they stopped thinking about basketball. So that was better. That’s been our whole thing all year is just we got us. And sometimes you, sometimes me, but always us. They live by that.”