Texico league opens

TEXICO - Are you ready for some basketball?

Girls from around Eastern New Mexico are, and they descended on Texico High School Monday for the start of the Texico Girls Basketball League. It was the first of four straight Mondays where girls basketball players from eighth grade through varsity, from Quay to Roosevelt to DeBaca to Parmer to Curry County, will be playing wall-to-wall hoops to hone their skills and try to improve as they look ahead to next winter.

"It's our season before the season, basically," Clovis girls varsity coach Jeff Reed said after he had finished coaching a contingent of his varsity players to a 31-22 victory over Farwell Monday night. "We don't get all the girls in offseason, so for some of them, it's the only time we get them to do stuff before November, before we start the season."

Not 'doing stuff' this week were Clovis returnees Hanna Nussbaumer - who's in Iceland - and Madison Tolbert - who's in Virginia. But there's enough of the upcoming season's varsity present for Reed to get a sense of what he has to work with and see who will implement it.

"Hopefully we get pleasantly surprised by girls that step up and do better than we thought," Reed said. "And hopefully this is an opportunity for them to be able to get better, and show us what they can or can't do and things that we need to work on or they need to get better at."

Texico girls coach Richard Luscombe echoed those sentiments.

"They all know they're going to play, they're all going to get in, they're going to play quite a few minutes," Luscombe said in his office Monday night. "So they get a chance to pretty much prove us right or prove us wrong. And that's what we look for."

All the coaches - which included Portales' Wade Fraze and Melrose's Caleb King as well as Luscombe, Reed and others - get more than just a glimpse into the upcoming season. With the high number of younger players, coaches are given kind of a crystal-ball gaze well into the '20s.

"I get to watch my eighth-graders, ninth-graders, JV, varsity," Reed said. "I could watch everybody through the program. So it's nice and convenient that they're all playing in the same school, same area. I can watch everybody and start getting an idea of the younger girls, what they can do, what we need to work on, how we've got to get better and just move on from there."

Having no pressure attached to these games is a big plus. It helps with the maturation process.

"The whole summer deal is we're getting to come together and start playing as a team, start learning the system right now," Reed said. "So hopefully when we get to November, we just pick up from that and carry over what we did in the summer time. We're not starting from scratch."

"They learn how to try some new things that they haven't done," Luscombe said. "We encourage them to come out of their shell a little bit. In the summer that's not anything that's going to be a big issue for them."

Conditioning this time of year is not what it is during the winter. But Luscombe thinks that's a plus, that it tests his players' mettle.

"You get to see how they play when they get a little bit tired, and I think that's a big part of it," Luscombe said. "They're more tired now than they are going to be during the season because they haven't been doing a whole lot. But I like to see how they perform whenever they're under a little bit of fatigue and see if they can begin to think their way through those things and play through a bit of adversity."

June ball can also be a way for next winter to start taking shape, serve as an early stretch of preseason. Reed, for instance, lost guard/post Mikyla Harkley when her family was transferred to Italy, and has departed seniors Antanishwa Molett, Kaydee Weaver and Tajvionna Johnson to replace as well. Luscombe also lost three seniors - leading scorer Baylee Sours, Jasmine Davalos and Nallely Ramirez.

"We do have some spots we need to fill," Luscombe said, "and we give kids a chance to do that. By the end of June, hopefully we'll be playing pretty well."