The setting was just right.
Hundreds of fans filled up about half of Bulldog Arena, a rare sight for a girls basketball game. And from tip-off, the gym was the loudest it had ever been all season for a matchup between No. 8 Turlock High and No. 9 Sheldon High in the Sac-Joaquin Section Division I playoffs on Thursday night.
The first-half produced 17 lead switches to set a tone that the winner would likely be the last one with the ball. Then suddenly, it became a reoccurring nightmare for the Bulldogs. Their opponent turned the 3-point line into a game of HORSE, as a trio of Sheldon players connected on 10 long-range shots to shock and silence the once noisy gym in a 64-50 win that handed Turlock back-to-back-to-back first-round heartbreaks.
“They got hot,” said junior guard Camille Roberts, the only Bulldog to reach double figures with 11 points. “What can you do about that?”
It was tough for Turlock to prepare for the game.
The Bulldogs didn’t know much about Sheldon before Thursday, except that the Huskies compete in a tough league — the Delta River League, which covers the Sacramento area — and topped St. Francis High (No. 1 in Division II) and Pleasant Grove (No. 5 in D-I) before finishing as co-champions with those teams. In other words, the Huskies could have been a higher seed.
The Bulldogs were mostly clueless to their opponents’ tendencies on the court. The only type of notes they had, coach Salinda Mabie said, were team statistics from online, which didn’t indicate that the Huskies had so many 3-point threats.
The barrage reached its peak in the fourth, when sophomore Brianna Burgos scored nine points during an 11-5 run in which she nailed two of her six 3-pointers to finish the night with a game-high 24 points. At that point, the Huskies built their biggest lead at 60-46, thanks in part to wearing out the Turlock players.
Again, there were 17 lead changes in the first half.
So what changed?
“I wish I could tell you,” Mabie said. “It’s almost like I gotta go back and replay it. It was such a blur to look up and we’re down 10 and just to see it slipping away from us.”
It was a heartbreaking end to a Bulldog season that boasted the school’s third consecutive CCC title and back-to-back undefeated league records. But despite all the accolades, the Turlock players and coaches weren’t really tested during the regular season. They blew out team after team, with their toughest competition coming in November and December at tournaments boasting some of the best squads around.
Then comes the CCC, in which Mabie considers a rebuilding league — though she has expressed that Pitman High is one of the more difficult teams to overcome. The coach tried to keep her team challenged by practicing against boys, but she said it’s not easy to emulate a team such as Sheldon, which is tested on a nightly basis.
“We don’t have that,” Mabie said. “Our girls play a tough preseason and play great basketball in December and then there’s two months where, ‘How do we get back up to that caliber?’”
Mabie is thinking about scheduling nonconference games at the midway point of next season, to keep her players tested during CCC action.
The loss was the last game for senior forward Candace Sakuda, who finished with eight points. Turlock allowed three Sheldon players to score more than 11 points on a night that was highlighted by a bevy of daggers from beyond the 3-point line.
“Compared to the CCC that we play in,” Roberts said, “the competition was a whole new level. Up north, they’re more physical. We were ready, but they were just hot off the 3-point line. We’ve never seen a team that hot at the 3-point line before.”
To contact Chhun Sun, e-mail csun@turlockjournal.com or call 634-9141 ext. 2041.