EDINBURG — Lexi Garcia and Ashley Gonzalez are best friends on and off the basketball court.
It wasn’t always that way.
“We played against each other, so we were enemies,” jowed Garcia, who played three years at Faith Christian Academy.
“Lexi and I are best friends,” Gonzalez added.
The Harvest Christian Academy freshmen have played key roles this season, leading their girls basketball team to a 21-2 record and a TAPPS 2A state quarterfinals matchup against at 6:30 tonight against Shiner St. Paul at Annapolis Christian School in Corpus Christi.
Gonzalez scored 34 points, Garcia added 14 and the Eagles blew past Bryan St. Joseph 60-32 on Tuesday, playing only their second home game of the season.
Garcia and Gonzalez had played basketball for the past three seasons in middle school, but at different middles schools so they fiercely competed against each other. Now, they complement one another.
“They look out for one another and they want for each other to succeed,” head coach Jaime Gonzalez said. “They know that if they play well it means more good things for the team. They are always together off the court hanging out, with their friendship.”
They, along with junior guard Hayley Vasquez, provide an uptempo offense with full-court man-to-man pressure from the tip-off until the end of the game. The Eagles score in waves, often off turnovers. Vasquez scored just five during Tuesday’s game but she has three games this season of more than 25 points and provides another dimension to the run-and-gun Eagles.
“Hayley is probably the most athletic on the team and just naturally fast,” Gonzalez said. “She’s the fastest and has natural instincts and if she gets hot she can score 20. If they try to box-and-one Ashley or if they double team someone, having a point guard like Lexi, she’ll get you the ball so it poses some options for us.”
Harvest Christian has played several quicker and bigger teams, Gonzalez said, but St. Paul is the fastest team he believes they will have played all year other than Roma, which they defeated along with other bigger UIL schools such as La Villa, Port Isabel and Mercedes.
Gonzalez is expecting to see somewhat of a mirror image defensively against St. Paul.
“From what I’ve gathered, they will play a full-court press in man and like to disrupt things. We have to be able to break their press,” Gonzalez said. “They’ve been known to have good athletes and doing well in sports. The key is going to be weathering the storm. They are a lot like us.”
Gonzalez said he has some high expectation from his post players, junior Laura Pena and freshman Samantha Muñoz, especially if history has anything to do with it.
“We haven’t been out-rebounded a lot this season, maybe four or five times,” Gonzalez said. “We were by eight on Tuesday. But something about this team that has been interesting is that every time we’ve lost the rebounding battle this year they’ve comeback to play better the next game and end up just playing great. I don’t know what it is but that’s been the history this season.”