Page 9 - Sanger Herald 3-28-19 E-edition

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SANGER HERALD * PAGE 1B * THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019
Learning to adopt a killer instinct is Apaches' goal
By Mike Nemeth
Sanger Herald
Sanger’s volleyball Apaches make winning look easy when they battle teams that don’t quite measure up to their skill level.
Such was the case March 21 at the Coach Dean Nicholson Gym at Sanger High when Sanger faced Madera’s Coyotes. The result was three sets in the win column.
But there’s a downside. As good as Sanger is — the team had a 19-7 overall record and a national ranking of 50th, according to MaxPreps.com as of this week — reaching the level of an elite team requires something extra.
That killer instinct.
“Instead of taking it to them every time, we should destroy every team in league and destroy them in the playoffs,” said assistant
Mike Nemeth / Sanger Herald
Jesus Gomez, left, gets the block against Madera.
immediately if your car’s stuck in the snow and needs a push (I’m using an Alaska analogy) or an old person needs help across the street.
But nice doesn’t cut it when taking on some of the top teams the Apaches have in tournaments. For instance, this past weekend Sanger lost a match to Monte Vista in Cupertino. The Matadors are ranked No. 34 nationally. But the Apaches beat all other competition over the weekend for four wins.
“It’s just efficiency,” said coach Scott Okada after the Madera game. “We weren’t real clean. You don’t want to build up habits.”
He advised in a diplomatic way to use every opportunity to play clean “for an entire set. We’ve got to find that balance.”
And finding that balance isn’t easy. The Clovis teams traditionally have been
tough. The Apaches lost to Clovis North but beat Clovis West twice. The team split with Clovis East.
Yet, this group of Apaches believes they have that something. Even if they’re nice. Former Apache and now UC Merced Bobcat Jose Gomez certainly provides an example, leading his team in kills and ranking the nation’s top 40 in kills and hitting percentage.
“We just learned how to come together as one unit and pick each other up when we’re down,” Jalao said. “Despite being down, we’ll always have each other’s backs. For sure.”
Aaron Ly explained that a little. “We’re well rounded,” he said. “We have chemistry. We play for each other.”
And as for his feelings about his teammates, he said, “Love ‘em. All of them are great. All of them have
potential.”
Jesus Gomez wore
icepacks on both knees. “Jumper’s knees,” he said. Gomez, a dominant force at the net, said his team can challenge the elites and win. “But we still have a lot to improve on,” he said. “As a team, we still have a lot to grow.”
On emotional ups and downs, which are the bane of a team looking to dominate consistently, Gomez said the team does a good job moderating peaks and valleys. “We just seem to move on,” he said. “We feel pretty comfortable.”
And Okada said the team is healthy again, “kind of. We’re headed back in the right direction.”
Her, the team’s primary setter, said he’s a believer. “Once we focus in, know what we have to do, then we’ll start playing how the coaches (want),” he said.
By Mike Nemeth
Sanger Herald
Mission Oak athletes warmed up in left field while pitcher Emily Fortaney practiced with catcher Katelyn Estep just outside of Sanger’s Apache softball diamond fences.
The pair paid little attention as one, two and then a haphazard flurry of butterflies beat their tiny wings across the softball field March 19. Fortaney and Estep focused on honing skills that would enable them to beat the visiting Hawks while the insects, a species known as painted ladies, traveled through Sanger in what could be record numbers on their way from the Mojave Desert to the Pacific Northwest.
Perhaps it was a sign. Something of a butterfly effect. Fresno County entomologist Gene Hannon said since his return to the central San Joaquin Valley in 2007, he’s never seen anything quite like the confetti-like flocks of migrating butterflies. He attributed it to the epic rains and widespread desert flower blooms that have been getting national attention and drawing hoards of tourists. “It is a natural phenomenon,” he said.
So was the game that afternoon.
Mike Nemeth / Sanger Herald
Catcher Katelyn Estep grins with her teammates during a game with Mission Oak.
score. Then four more found home plate before the Apaches threw out the Hawk's Melendez on her return in the batting rotation. Final score was 11-9.
Vanessa Leon, from last year’s team, wasn’t worried. “They’re good,” she said of her Apaches. Leon said she’s coaching eighth grade at Washington Academic Middle School and attending Fresno State.
Castro, a senior on this year’s team, paused a bit when asked for her assessment of the 2019 Apaches. “It’s a new team,” she said. “New players. We’re growing. We’re going to keep practicing hard, and we’re going to be ready.”
Fortaney put it this way. “One of our biggest things is having the heart to play and go all out,” she said. “We need to be able to communicate. I’m hoping that we can grow. I know we can do better.
“We shouldn’t be struggling after a 10-0 lead.”
Estep said the team has “so many good players. It’s just a matter of consistency. Who is going to work harder, basically. Once we find the lineup, we’re going to Valleys. We’ve been really working on leadership. We can go all the way, but every day we’ve got to put in the work.”
Coach Erica Pennington said her starting nine players are completely different this year and that she and her assistant coaches, Marissa Marquez and Stephanie Weathers, have yet to settle on a solid starting lineup.
“It’s who’s going to show up on any given day,” she said. “We tell them it’s a tryout every day.
“They have so much talent. We’re just waiting for them. They have to learn the game and learn (how their teammates play).”
Pennington said sometimes one is hot while the other is cold, or the reverse is true. “They’re fun to coach,” she said after putting away concessions from the game.
And Pennington said they all get along so well.
Back to butterflies. The National Weather Service on March 21 declared an end to California’s drought, explaining that it’s the first time the state is drought free since 2011. Wildflowers are everywhere. And painted lady butterflies enjoy them.
But not one of them flies in a straight line. They do, however, get where they want to go.
The Apaches are headed where they want to go. A little adjustment here and there and they may find a way deep into the post-
coach Marcos Mireles after the game.
Mireles meant it in the nicest way. Really. The specific criticism of the Apaches against the Coyotes had to do with occasional lapses and their first set in the match, a 25-18 win. The Apaches allowed just a little too much offense. “That wasn’t
even their best,” he said as the athletes left the court.
They’re nice guys. Grant Harrison, John Her, Aaron Ly, Gohan Thao, Kennedy Navo, Adrian Mercado, Brennan Taylor, Aidyn Jalao, Jesus Gomez, Madhav Singh, Ethan Ly, Jose Duran, Britton Navo and Luis Villegas are the types to volunteer
Apaches embrace butterfly effect
By Mike Nemeth
Sanger Herald
Carolina Briones took up boxing gloves a year ago, and now she has a win and a trophy to show for her dedication.
The 15-year-old beat Penelope Salazar in a March 16 rematch of a fight from September 2018 in which the situation was reversed. Briones had lost. The latest fight was held at Hanford High.
This time Briones said she made sure she was ready.
“For two weeks I would be in the ring fighting with people here,” she said last week at the Sanger Youth Center boxing gym on
Mike Nemeth / Sanger Herald
Carolina Briones won her match and this trophy.
Eighth and L streets where she trains daily. She said she would go six rounds, each with a different opponent. “I even fought my brother Marco.”
Briones is a member
of the Sanger Boxing Club, which has grown significantly in the past year. Fellow boxer Alyssa Samorano, 11, won a belt earlier this year and is expected to be defending it next month.
Mario Irazoqui, longtime coach, gathered most of the girls training March 18 at practice for an announcement to recognize Briones’ accomplishment. “She fought a girl and brought the trophy back home, so give her a hand,” he said.
They did.
Briones credited her success with training. Hard. She said her coach Ernesto Betancourt would practice with her, holding mitts she
could punch, “nonstop.” “And for two weeks, I wouldn’t eat any junk food,” she said. “Not even a piece of candy. Not even
hot Cheetos, my favorite.” Not even a Kit Kat bar. Briones said she trained
up to three hours a day. “I had to drop 5 pounds,” she said. “I’d run miles. Literally, the only thing on my mind was the trophy.” She repeated the mantra “I have to win, I have to win” to herself over and over.
The day of the fight came. Salazar is taller and has a longer reach. They competed in 150-pound weight class.
“She was nervous at the fight,” Betancourt said. “Asking, questioning all the
time about what to do. I told her she would be fine.”
Briones got a fat lip, but she out-pointed her opponent. “Good punches to the body and then to the head,” Betancourt said.
“I did hit her in the head,” Briones said. She said the nerves disappeared once she got in the ring. And Briones gave as an example of her intensity the fact that the referee stopped the fight to pull the two apart after her opponent grabbed and held her gloves.
Briones said she hugged Salazar afterward. “I told her, ‘You win more by losing,’” she said. “I felt bad because I know how it feels to lose. This was before the judges made
their decision.”
Fellow club member
Johnathan Espinoza, 17, worked extensively with Briones prior to her fight. “I had her practice more defense, work on her timing and her speed,” he said, adding that he tried to motivate her mentally “and teach her everything I could help her with.”
Espinoza said he was proud. “She brought it home,” he said.
Briones said her goals are to get more wins and participate in Golden Gloves competition.
The reporter can be contacted by email at nemethfeatures@gmail.com or by phone at the Herald at (559) 875-2511.
The Hawks started strong in the top of the first inning with utility player Payton Quinonez singling on her first at bat. But she didn’t get far before getting tagged out trying to steal second. The Apaches also tagged Mission Oak’s Madison Romero at third just before Fortaney fanned Hawk Jayden Sanders for the final out.
Then it got weird. Kind of.
The Apaches racked up 10 runs just before Sophia Mares nearly made it 11 but instead got the third out, ending one of the most prolific first innings for the team in recent memory. Apaches led 10-0.
Scores were notched by Amber Vasquez, Janessa Montejano, Sophia Mares, Isabel Rosales, Natalya Pasillas, Alyssa Montejano, Danessa Castro and Cassandra Acosta.
And there it stayed, for awhile. Mission Oak showed flashes of offense like in top of the third inning when Kaylee Melendez tripled and scored on the next play to make it 10-1. The Hawks added two more runs that inning.
Then the teams battled it out. Freshman Malia Alvarez replaced Fortaney on the pitcher’s mound. Madison Lopez put on catcher’s gear and entered the game.
Natalya Pasillas scored for the Apaches in the bottom of the sixth inning when Leah Estrada singled, bringing the score to 11-4. But the next inning almost derailed Sanger’s lead.
Maybe it truly was the butterfly effect, a variant of the chaos theory where a tiny change in a complex system can have drastic side effects. Thus the earlier reference to the painted lady butterflies.
A bunch kept fluttering their tiny wings around the diamond, causing all sorts of imagined havoc.
However, the Hawks went wild in the top of the seventh, with Melendez starting it off with another
Boxer Briones wins in Hanford and vows to keep fighting