By JOSHUA McKINNEY, Staff Writer
The Porter Cowboys’ season ended with a blowout loss to one of the Rio Grande Valley’s top basketball programs.
Edinburg Vela, ranked eighth in the latest Texas Association of Basketball Coaches Class 5A poll, beat Porter 107-62 in their bi-district game Monday at Edinburg Vela.
Hector Ruiz scored a game-high 32 points for Edinburg Vela (31-2, 12-0). Alex De La Cruz and Ryan Garza each scored 14 points.
Edinburg Vela’s offense ran the court the entire night, with 11 different players scoring points and combining for 12 3s. The Sabercats had 13 steals, with most of those coming from their full-court press.
Luis Garza led Porter (14-17, 8-6) with 23 points. Mike Reyes had 11 points and five assists, and Erick Menendez scored eight points.
Monday’s lopsided score will be motivation for Porter going into the next season. The Cowboys return most of their core players, and they’ll look to hunt down one of District 32-5A’s playoff spots again next season.
“I think my son (Luis Garza II) played really well today,” Porter coach Luis Garza said. “I was impressed with him. I think the team is growing. We’re going to return (Rey Martinez), (Andres Fragoso), (Luis Garza II). We’re only losing (Mike Reyes) that is significant.
“Everybody else is coming back next year. I’m really happy with the effort, and I think my son did a hell of a job today. My other son (Albert Garza) didn’t do as well as I wanted him to, but the young one did well. It’s a stroke of positive for us.”
Porter and Edinburg Vela were neck-and-neck at the start of the first. The teams swapped leads, and Porter led by three points after buckets from Albert Garza and Luis Garza II.
A few possessions later, Edinburg Vela broke a 7-7 tie with a 3 from Chris Ochoa, the start of a 19-2 scoring streak the Sabercats rode toward a 23-8 lead by the end of the first.
Edinburg Vela coach Lalo Rios thinks playing at home might have been the culprit in the Sabercats’ slow start to the game.
“I think the excitement of playing at home (affected his team),” Rios said. “I think our kids were a little too excited. I think Porter came out tough. They weren’t rattled by the crowd, rattled by the environment. I think they came out really prepared.”
Porter tried to take momentum and put together some streaks during the second quarter, but Edinburg Vela answered when the Cowboys started to surge.
The Sabercats went into halftime with a 52-32 lead. The closest Porter came to the lead the rest of the game was 12 points.
“We just had some mistakes handling the ball, a couple of passes here and there that we didn’t make,” Garza said. “We didn’t (rebound) well. I think the biggest thing is we needed to do a better job on the boards. I think we could live with missing shots. We just couldn’t live with giving up second-shot opportunities, and I think that’s what hurt us the most.”
The Sabercats started the third quarter on a 16-4 run and scored 37 points total to put the game away heading into the fourth.
“I think that’s where you really saw the big difference in the speed and the fatigue factor,” Edinburg Vela coach Lalo Rios said. “I think it started in the second quarter when we had that (11-2) run towards the end of the quarter. That started everything. When we came out in the third quarter, that’s when we really took off.”
Joshua McKinney covers high school sports for The Brownsville Herald. You can reach him at (956) 982-6663 or via email at [email protected]. On Twitter, he’s @joshuabvherald.