A scrappy Dolores County girls team gave Mancos High School all it wanted through much of the District III Pigtail Basketball Game Tuesday night, Feb. 20, in the Mancos Performance Center. The Blue Jays emerged with a 63-39 win and earned the right to take the fourth spot in the District III Basketball Tournament which opens Friday afternoon, Feb. 23, and concludes Saturday afternoon, Feb. 24, at Montezuma-Cortez High School (see related story). The Blue Jays battle top-seeded and undefeated Dolores High at 7 p.m. Friday.

"We are right where we should be but losing that game to Telluride (last weekend) put us from second to fourth and now we must play (top-seeded and undefeated) Dolores. But that’s the way it goes. We have a big challenge ahead of us. We are going to work at it and we have some ideas on how to try and stop them. We just have to go out and execute and play well. But we have shown we can play them. We did once this season."

Mancos could not buy a basket early in the first quarter against the Bulldogs. It really wasn’t so much of the Bulldogs denying the Blue Jays a good look, it just they missed so many shots.

"I don’t know why sometimes we can’t seem to make those easy ones," Dimmick commented after the game. "Maybe they need to practice more layups on their own. We have been a slow starting team but once we get going we generally can do pretty well. We played well at times and not at other times."

Dove Creek even held a slim 2-1 lead with 6 minutes, 02 seconds to play. However, Kerri Morgan put the Blue Jays for good at 4-2 and they never trailed again. Dove Creek moved the ball well but couldn’t find any cutters moving inside. Lacey Morris muscled in a shot to put MHS up 8-2 but Bulldog Michelle Davis canned a three over the 2-3 zone. Mancos led 11-6 when the quarter ended.

Mancos did not play the baseline well on offense, so the shots were few and far between inside. However, on the defensive side of the ball, the Blue Jays pressed the Bulldogs and that created problems. They stretched their lead to 17-11 with 4:04 left. Rachael Hightower made a nice putback which cut the difference to 17-13. A few seconds later the Jays went up 21-13 when Morris made a layup off an assist from Morgan who had made a steal. Morgan stretched the Blue Jay lead to 23-13 after sinking both ends of a one-plus-one with 2:18 showing. The DCHS players became frustrated. Mancos led 33-16 when Jolene Thomas threw in a shot at the buzzer at the half.

Mancos took advantage of several lazy passes and turned them into scores. An old-fashioned three-point play by Amanda Kennedy gave the Blue Jays a commanding 40-16 lead with 6:13 left in the third period. Up to that point DCHS had not made a field goal. Davis made an old-fashioned three-point play of her own which made the score 46-21 with 1:05 left. The score stayed that way when the quarter ended.

Dolores County never gave up, especially in the fourth quarter. Shandra Johnson made two buckets in a row. Hightower made a steal and layup for a 6-0 run. DCHS still trailed 46-27. Following a Mancos basket, Hightower gunned in a three and then made a steal and layup, but Mancos was up 56-34. Dimmick called time to regroup his troops with 3:01 remaining. But the Jays had too great a lead for DCHS to mount a comeback.

"They played hard to the end," DCHS first-year head coach Kim Young said. "We have a young team but they never gave up. The whole year they never gave up even though we didn’t win many games, they were there playing hard. With only one win (going into the pigtail game) they could have hit rock bottom, but they played well. This first year was a rough one but I think we have a lot to look forward to in the future."

Morgan led all scorers with 19 while MHS teammates Katie Paxton hit for 15 and Morris added eight and Kennedy seven. Hightower paced DCHS with 15, Davis added nine and Erin Ivie and Johnson six each.