The San Marcos High girls basketball team saw its special season come to an end Thursday night at the Thunderhut, as the team could never find its rhythm on offense, losing to Imperial High 43-30 in the second round of the CIF State Tournament.
With the loss, San Marcos ends its season at 22-7.
“I told the girls at the end of the game, yes, it’s disappointing that we lost tonight, but if you look at the overall picture, we had a hell of a season and we did stuff that San Marcos girls basketball has never done,” Royals coach Tiffany Simms said.
“So we have to use this as motivation for next year, as a barometer of where we could go, and how much further we can go with a little bit of work in the offseason.”
San Marcos will also return most of its players next season, as the team fielded only two seniors: Ariel Plourde and Piper Nielson.
Plourde said after the game that she loved everything her team accomplished this season, including beating Santa Barbara High for the first time in her career, as well as making a deep run in the CIF-SS playoffs and winning a round in the state tournament, the first in the program’s history.
“I’m honestly just really proud of the way we’ve grown as a team and how far we have come and the history that we have made,” Plourde, who finished with four points, said. “It has been really fun playing with these girls. They’re like my second family, so it’s just really awesome being able to keep playing with them this far into the year.
“The team dynamic that we have is really exciting and really fun to play with. … Honestly, we have a lot of good memories just hanging out. We do a lot of team bonding on and off the court. We’re really close and it’s just been a lot of fun being able to get really close with these girls and they’re some of my best friends, so I’m really gonna miss it. ”
San Marcos offense is predicated on hitting the deep ball, but Thursday night the deep shots were just not falling.
The Royals missed all of their 3-point attempts in the first half, and their first make came with just 4:01 remaining. In total, San Marcos made just two 3-point shots.
“I want to say we had a little game fatigue, a little mental fatigue, just fatigued all over and our shots just weren’t falling,” Simms said. “We couldn’t get into a rhythm offensively.”
But the Royals other forte on the court is defense, and Simms said she was telling the girls all night, “just play our game” in hopes of sneaking one out in the end.
San Marcos trailed 12-4 at the end of the first quarter, but started the second frame on a 9-0 run thanks in part to forcing five Tiger turnovers.
Sophomore guard Mia Martinez-tomatis scored seven of the nine points in the run for the Royals. She led the Royals in scoring, pouring in 14 points.
After a make by Imperial, Martinez-tomatis would score another fast-break layup to give San Marcos the lead once again, 15-14, with 4:05 remaining.
That would be the last time the Royals would score in the half, however, as the Tigers went on a 10-0 run over the final four minutes to take a 24-15 lead into the break.
In the second half, San Marcos would never let the lead balloon over 16, but only got it under double digits once, as the team could just never hit the shot to really get them back into the contest.
Imperial started the third quarter with a 8-0 run, with San Marcos finally hitting its first shot in about eight minutes of game time with 4:01 remaining when Michelle Arrellanes hit the first 3 of the night for the home team.
Trailing by 15, Martinez-tomatis would score her 3 with just under 20 seconds remaining in the frame to head into the fourth quarter down by 12 points.
In the fourth quarter, a steal and coast-to-coast layup by sophomore guard Ellie Monson brought the Royals to within nine with 5:06 remaining.
Unfortunately, the offense went cold again for San Marcos after that, as Imperial went on a 6-2 run over the final five minutes to close out the game.
Imperial’s junior forward Sierra Morris led all scorers with 17.
After the great season, Simms looks forward to the coming year, in hopes of continuing to build a new tradition at San Marcos.
“Of course every coach wants to win the Channel League,” Simms said. “Every coach wants to win a CIF, so that’s the goal. That’s the ultimate goal for the season,” Simms said.
“The immediate goal is just to return our players healthy, work in the offseason, get a little bit stronger, a little bit better, and just build on the good stuff that we did.”