For a third consecutive season, the Sedona Red Rock High School girls basketball team has reached the Final Four of the Arizona Interscholastic Association 2A State Championship.

The Scorpions [19-0, 12-0 Central Region] are still trying to punch their ticket to their first-ever championship game, this year against No. 4 seed Chandler Preparatory Academy. At this point it is not even a mentality of one game at a time; it is one quarter at a time.

“From the beginning of the tournament, we talk about 16 quarters, we’ve got 16 quarters left in our season, we’re going to focus on the first four. Then it went down to 12,” Red Rock head coach Dave Moncibaez said. “And then now we’re down to eight. We’re down to eight quarters and we’re focusing on the next four. We’re trying to play our game quarter-by-quarter. The whole philosophy is win the quarter, win the game.”

The first quarter of the game tips off at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 23, at the Prescott Valley Event Center.

Chandler Prep’s two best players are guards, one who does a good job of dribbling into the painted area and another who shoots the ball well from the three-point line. Like Red Rock, the Titans went undefeated in regular season power-point games at 19-0 and swept through the Metro East Region [12-0]. They beat No. 13 Hopi High School in the first round 46-34 before narrowly beating No. 12 St. Johns High School 45-42 in the quarterfinals.

Red Rock ran past No. 16 Many Farms High School 60-33 in the first round before defeating No. 9 Alchesay High School 54-42 in the quarterfinals.

At this stage, though, seeding is merely a number, proven by No. 11 Thatcher High School reaching the other semifinal game.

“The girls know that and understand that; it’s just not going to be a cakewalk because nobody goes there thinking they’re going to lose,” Moncibaez said. “We’ve got to go out there and play our game and be mentally tough and do the fundamental things.”

Repeated playoff success aside, this season has been a different one for Red Rock than recent seasons. The past two years it habitually got up on teams early and never trailed en route to victory. When it did trail, it had been unable to recover from deficits. But now it has made comebacks, like in an 11-point win over Payson High School on Dec. 11 after falling behind by 10 at halftime.

“Every time that we’ve gotten down [in the semifinals] we have not been able to come back, but that was the team we were before, and as of [Saturday, Feb. 17] I think we were down by 12 at one point and we just keep going. We have never stopped or given up at all, that’s not our team,” said senior guard Liza Westervelt after the quarterfinal win.

Moncibaez pointed out that the resiliency is borne from past experiences. The Scorpions lost 63-47 to this year’s No. 2 seed, Leading Edge Academy – Gilbert, in the semifinals. They lost to Thatcher in their first Final Four appearance.

“I bring it up in talks, you know how it feels to be down and lose badly,” Moncibaez said. “You know how that loss feels, you know how that Final Four the last two years felt. But at the same time you’ve beaten better teams than you’ve lost to.”

Of the three semifinal appearances, this might come as the biggest surprise, given the fact that weeks before the season there almost was not a team at all due to a lack of players. Three key players from last year are gone through graduation and injury.

The Scorpions have used a holiday tournament to play against competition from bigger schools, but did not this year to stay healthy. Really only six players play valuable minutes.

The team still swept through its Central Region schedule, and on top of that defeated Conference 3A’s No. 3 team Page High School. Page is a semifinalist in the 3A state tournament this year.

“We have that fight, no one believes in us and our coach always tells us to show them why we deserve to be there. They say you shouldn’t be the No. 1 seed, so we have to prove when we win that we are the No. 1 seed,” sophomore forward Mary Westervelt said.

Winning that regular season finale was big for the team’s confidence.

It lifted the team to the No. 1 seed entering the tournament; the last two years it made it as the No. 6.

Should the Scorpions win, they will take on the winner of No. 11 Thatcher High School and No. 2 Leading Edge Academy – Gilbert at 3 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 24, at the Prescott Valley Event Center.