By MARIO AGUIRRE | STAFF WRITER
For the start of his senior year, Mission Veterans’ Leo Salazar was asked by coach Romeo De La Garza to make something of a radical change. After playing three years at shooting guard, he asked to take over point guard duties.
Not only that, he was often relied upon to defend the opposing team’s top perimeter player.
Salazar admitted that the change made him “nervous at first, but I just played through it.” He had showed signs the previous year of being able to handle such a task, having garnered the team’s “Credit Card Award,” given to the player that takes the most charges, while earning the district’s top defensive prize.
This past season, he took 37 charges, averaging 1.02 per game. And he was among the Valley’s leaders in steals, picking away 2.5 per contest. He earned the district’s top defensive honor once again, and he distinguished himself as the All-Valley Defensive Player of the Year.
“He always did the little thing at the defensive end and never backed away from a challenge I gave him,” De La Garza said.
Salazar was able to keep up with that pace, even while playing man-to-man defense nearly every possession and having to juggle ball-distribution duties on the other end. He finished the year in the top 5 in assists, averaging 5.8 per game. And he helped lead a Mission Veterans team that started off the year virtually unbeatable among Valley competition.
“What coach told us is, defense is our offense,” Salazar said. “If we get steals, we’ll put it in transition and score.”
As a whole, the Patriots were known for taking charges, forcing teams such as Houston Wheatley, along with others across the Valley, to adjust their offensive approach. Rather than attack with basket with reckless abandon, the opposition often had to alter their drives, either settling for jumpers or trying to curl around defenders to avoid a foul call.
Either way, it threw some teams out of their comfort zone, and it played into the Patriots’ hands. That was the Mission Veterans way, and that’s what Salazar did better than anyone on the team.
“It felt good,” Salazar said. “Coach would always tell me, as one of the stoppers on the team, to take charges and hold their best guy to below their (season scoring) averages.”