By ANDREW CRUM, Staff Writer
Port Isabel’s Alexandria Martinez improved on her defensive prowess from last season. Not that she needed too.
Martinez continued to earn praise for her defense this season, and was named the co-defensive player of the year for District 32-4A alongside Illiana Ayala of La Feria. Now, Martinez will need to clear some more space on her trophy shelf, as she is a back-to-back winner of The Brownsville Herald’s 2016 All-Metro Defensive Player of the Year award.
“It’s exciting,” Martinez said. “It’s pretty great and honorable. I worked for it; I practiced harder on defense (this season). It’s my strongest point in basketball, so I’m glad.”
The senior led the Rio Grande Valley in steals with 7.2 per game and also increased her scoring average by seven points from last season to 16.4 in 2016. Martinez grabbed four rebounds, and dished out 2.2 assists per game.
“(The award) means a lot,” Port Isabel coach Blake Ramsey said. “I definitely put a lot of emphasis on defense and anytime one of my players gets recognized on the defensive end, it’s a great accomplishment. It makes me really proud of her, especially to win it back-to-back.”
Port Isabel fell short of a postseason berth this season, but Martinez accomplished another goal that she set out to do.
“I wanted to set an example for the young ones,” she said. “I wanted to push myself further to make my last year worth it. I’m not disappointed (in our season). We played really well, and every game we lost it was close.
“We fought through every game, we never gave up, we fought to the end. That’s what I’m proud of.”
Ramsey wasn’t surprised to see his star defender rise up to the challenge this season. It was her senior year, and her main role was as the team’s stopper. She seemed to thrive in the defensive scheme because she trusted her teammates to help her out if they needed to.
Martinez said she didn’t do anything special this season except work a little harder. But she gave the credit to her coach for helping her achieve her success.
“I think (playing defense) helped me a lot, especially on offense,” she said. “On defense, (Ramsey) pushed me to go further of what I thought I could do and I appreciate that so much from him. He saw me more than what I thought I was, so I thank him a lot for pushing me throughout the whole season and during previous seasons.”
With Martinez set to graduate this year, Ramsey will miss her abilities, but he was confident she has already trained her replacement.
“I’m definitely going to miss seven steals a game,” Ramsey said. “Her mentality of her being defensive minded and putting that emphasis on the younger girls that we need to limit other teams scoring to put ourselves in a position to win. I think we’ll definitely miss that leadership and working hard in practice every day. But, I think she’s left her legacy helping the younger girls for next season.”
Andrew Crum covers sports for The Brownsville Herald. You can reach him at (956) 982-6629 or via email at [email protected]. On Twitter he’s @andrewmcrum.