While Navajo runners led the Sedona Marathon field Saturday, Feb. 6, Big Park Community School’s girls basketball players not only returned the favor but won over native fans on their way to the Four Corners Basketball Championship in Chinle.
“We won the hearts of a lot of fans on the Navajo reservation,” said Coyotes head coach Kirk Westervelt. “A few were actually cheering for us in the final game.”
Daughter Mary Claire Westervelt scored 19 points, 11 of those in the first half, while fellow eighth-grader Morgan Fritz added eight to hand Lukachukai Community School its first defeat, 42-21.
“It seems like a blowout,” Westervelt said. “But, in reality, we just kept wearing them down, physically and mentally. We were definitely the better team.”
Fritz would be named tournament Most Valuable Player following the win, which ended the Coyotes’ season at 24-0, effectively crowning them champions of Arizona’s Small Schools girls basketball teams for the first time.
“This was the first time in the 30-year history of the tournament that a non-native team won the girls basketball championship,” said Westervelt, who broke through in a season he called “magical” after runner-up finishes in 2013 and 2014. “We exorcised a few demons.”
Including Many Farms Community School, the only losses in those previous seasons for the Coyotes, vanquished at last, 32-25, in the Feb. 6 semifinal. It was only the second single-digit win of the season for the Coyotes.
“They pressed us the whole game,” Westervelt said. “Having not just a good point guard but two good ballhandlers, something I’ve never had before, broke it.”
Two fourth-quarter steals by eighth-grade forward Jacki King overcame foul trouble she suffered most of the game.
“Jacki’s got so much upside for never playing basketball before this year,” he said. “The quickness reacting to the ball over the top of the zone and zone press … if I had her for three years, it would be scary. We’d be in destroy mode.”
The Warriors were one of three teams with virtual home court advantage at the $37 million Wildcat Den, which is one of America’s 15 biggest high school gyms, holding 7,000 people just 10 miles south of Many Farms, Westervelt said.
The undefeated Eagles, though, fell behind 23-11 after a first half in which Fritz was whistled for four fouls and King and Grace Hafner for three each, sending the Eagles’ center to the free-throw line 10 times.
But in the second half, Westervelt moved his daughter down low on defense again, limiting the Eagles center to just two second-half points and the whole team to the same amount in the fourth quarter despite Fritz spending most of the third period on the bench.
King’s three coast-to-coast layups made the difference in a 9-2 fourth quarter, but seventh-grade guard Tashanae Kristofors burned the Eagles double teams of Fritz and Westervelt with seven points.
“Talk about the X-factor,” Westervelt said. “Tashanae pretty much didn’t score the whole tournament before then.”
Fritz hit for 18 and all-tournament first-teamers Hafner and Westervelt combined for 22 in Big Park’s opening win of the tournament Friday, Feb. 5, a 44-20 rout of Round Rock Elementary School.
“I told Grace that every team needs that blue collar player,” Kirk Westervelt said. “They bring their lunch pail to work.”
He estimated that, of all 13 of the small schools in the tournament, Big Park has the smallest enrollment, with just 72 boys and girls enrolled in sixth through eighth grades — and shrinking.
“If Big Park lasted another 100 years, people will look back and say this was their finest year,” he said. “I’ve always had nice kids, but you can’t argue with undefeated.”
For Big Park’s scores and all-tournament selections, please see the Friday, Feb. 12, issue of the Sedona Red Rock News.
