The Northern New Mexico College men’s and women’s basketball teams have already made an impression in their first year in the CAL PAC conference.
Each earned byes into the conference tournament semifinals, leaving them two wins from qualifying for next month’s NAIA national championships.
Both teams play Sunday in Vallejo, California, with the second-seeded men facing the winner between Pacific Union and tournament host Cal Maritime, while the third-seeded women will play host to Cal Maritime.
The men (8-11, 3-1) overcame the loss of post Kevin Jamieson and were forced to adjust to a different style of play to compensate for the lack of size.
“It made us pivot on how we need to play,” Eagles coach Mike Dominguez said. “We had to change the way we played. I play eight-nine guys and not one of them is over 6-3. We play faster. We want to push the tempo and use our speed to our advantage. And we’ve had to talk to the guys more about rebounding and blocking out, gang rebounding and making all five guys go get it because we are small.”
But it helped that scorer TJ Sanchez returned at the start of the new year after having some issues with credit transfers, and all he did was average a team-best 19.8 points and 5.2 rebounds in his nine games.
“TJ has been with me since he came out of Capital (High School),” Dominguez said. “He feels comfortable and he’s a leader. He plays so hard. And has a ton of energy and its contagious. When you’re playing with him, he makes you play just as hard as he does. He’s flying around everywhere, consistently. He’s skilled and he can shoot it at a high level and get to the rim and do other things. He should be first team all conference.”
But Sanchez had plenty of help scoring as five other players averaged at least 9.8 points per game. Harkirath Makhar was solid, averaging 14.3 points and 5.1 rebounds. Diego Sharp contributed 12.4 points and Ja’Kwon Hill was just behind at 12.3 points.
“Everybody has gotten better throughout the year,” Dominguez said. “The thing I give them credit for all the time is they’ve been coachable. For the most part, everybody throughout the roster, they let me coach them hard. They don’t get into their feelings. They let me coach them. When you’re coaching them, the truth hurts, but they’ve all been good with it.”
It’s made for a successful season, he said.
“We’ve played well and the guys are competing,” Dominguez said. “I’ve really enjoyed this season. We’ve put ourselves in a good position to hopefully get to the national tournament. Every team’s goal is to play at the national tournament and we’re two games away.”
And the women are chasing the same dream.
“My expectations are to win it,” Eagles women’s coach Mandy Montoya said. “We played a total of three conference games and we’re playing the one team we didn’t play. But our expectations are we want to win the whole thing. We know we can play all these teams. We played the one seed and we were up by 15 in the first quarter and lost by five. The last five or six games, we’ve been playing really well. I don’t expect anything less.”
The Lady Eagles (10-11, 2-1) played a brutal early schedule filled with much larger teams so the record is deceiving.
“I think the season went well,” Montoya said. “To start off, early we were playing a lot of D-I, D-II games which definitely tested us, but got us ready for conference. When we played conference games, we won two of the games really big, pretty handily.”
So that’s a strong showing with a new coach and several new players.
“It was a new system for them, so getting used to that and building chemistry was really challenging,” Montoya said. “It was a non-stop schedule. The whole month of November, I don’t think we were even home much.”
But that worked out well.
“I think it builds chemistry,” she said. “You’re on the road so much and the challenges of playing those tough teams builds your character. We had to raise our level of play.”
The Lady Eagles got a huge lift from Jayden Jenkins, who averaged 18.6 points and 10.2 rebounds.
“She’s been a double-double machine,” Montoya said. “She’s consistent night in and night out.”
Paulina Lopez and her sister Romina Lopez were steady ball handlers at the point and Pojoaque Valley alum GG Romero proved to be a valued threat at off guard with 10.3 points, while Montoya was able to plug and play Mistidawn Roybal wherever she was needed.
“At first, we were very hesitant, trying to do too much but once they bought in to the system, the ball just moved,” Montoya said. “There were times, coming down in transition, the ball touched everybody’s hands. It was beautiful basketball.”