BY SAUL BERRIOS-THOMAS | THE MONITOR
McALLEN — McAllen Memorial senior forward Josh Sanchez can post a triple-double without too much stress.
If he plays well and stays within the offense, he can find those types of numbers on most nights. But Sanchez has a mind for the game, and he realizes that getting his teammates going is crucial.
“Coach tells them all the time like, ‘They are just going to stop him (Sanchez). They are going to underestimate you guys. That’s when you guys need to step up,’” Sanchez said of his coach, Sam Cortez. “(Cortez) has confidence that they are going to step up, and they have so far in district.”
When the Mustangs faced off with the La Joya Palmview Lobos on Dec. 30, Memorial tried to get Sanchez going.
“We tried to feed him in the beginning of the game, but it just wasn’t working,” senior guard Chris Melendez said. “So, we just had to step up, and it worked.”
The onus fell on senior guards Melendez and Chris Flores. Both players responded by carrying the scoring load. Flores scored 22, and Meledez had 18.
“Against Palmview, they were box-and-one (a defensive scheme focused on stopping one main scorer) the whole game on me. That makes it difficult for them to get me the ball,” Sanchez said. “I had under 10 in that game. Considering how much we beat them by, I think it was 20 points, it shows that we have more than just one weapon, and we are going to use all of it to our advantage.”
Sanchez still managed seven points and led the team with 10 rebounds, but his commitment to the team allowed the Mustangs to win on that night.
In Memorial’s win over rival McAllen High on Friday, Sanchez had 19 points, but that wasn’t even a game high, because Flores also had 19 while Melendez added 13.
“My point guard, Chris (Flores), they forget that he is pretty good, too,” Cortez said. “I have a three-headed monster. You try to take one guy away, that’s OK. We have two more that can make you pay on any night.”
Sanchez’s teammates regard him as a leader, but the Mustangs know leaning on him is not the only avenue to victory.
“We just have to step up, because they are going to try to shut down Josh every game,” Melendez said. “So, we just have to step up, and if we do, it’s hard to beat us.”
Sanchez has the skill and size of a collegiate player.
This season, he is averaging 14.5 points, 9.4 rebounds, 3.5 assists and 1.2 steals per game.
“He’s on another level,” Cortez said. “He belongs at the next level. You can see it. Sometimes he doesn’t score as much as another guy, but if you look at his stats, he leads in every category. He leads in rebounds. He gets assists. I think he has had two or three triple-doubles this season, already. So that’s impressive on its own.”
Sanchez attacks the paint with a furious rage that often causes defenders to duck out of the way rather than absorb the contact. He learned that skill at a young age. Josh Sanchez played one-on-one in the driveway with his older brother Jonathan Sanchez, who was a standout in football and basketball at McAllen Memorial before graduating in 2016 and pursuing a college football career at Rice University in Houston.
“We have broken two basketball hoop backboards at my house,” the younger Sanchez said. “We would go really hard at the house. That’s why I finish in the paint the way I do, because of the way he would play me. There were no refs, so we would go hard.”
Josh Sanchez has built his own identity after sharing the spotlight with his brother for the first two years of his career, but those two seasons created several memories. Josh and Jonathan shared the frontcourt for all of Josh’s senior year and much of the year before.
“He was the 5 and I was the 4,” Josh Sanchez said. “My oldest brother, John Paul, made a video after the season, and it was a combined highlight video of just Jonathan and I passing the ball to each other and scoring. It was like 3 minutes long, and there was tons of passing in the paint. You could see we knew exactly what we were doing and where we were going. You could see the chemistry was there between us. My family loved seeing that video, because me and my brother were playing together.”
The 2015-16 season holds a lot of significance for Josh Sanchez, as it is the last time the Mustangs advanced past the first round of the playoffs. Last year, Memorial was ousted in the opening round by Laredo United.
The painful loss resonated with the Mustangs, and that pain is what motivates them to go farther this year.
“I think we can beat the Laredo teams,” Melendez said. “We just didn’t show up last year. We played a tournament over there, and we did great. I think we should be able to win this year.”