Falcons’ state hopes dashed

DENVER — Vanessa Vigil, as effortlessly as she did in the first half, dropped another layup in the basket at Hamilton Gymnasium with 3 minutes, 21 seconds left in the third quarter to give Front Range Christian a 14-point lead.

Matthew Jonas

Front Range Christian School’s Vanessa Vigil puts up a shot past Rangely’s Haeley Enterline during the third quarter of a 2A regional basketball playoff game on March 4 at Hamilton Gymnasium at the University of Denver.

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It looked as if Front Range Christian’s girls basketball team was less than 12 minutes away from a trip to Pueblo and the 2A state basketball tournament on March 5. But Sedgwick County, like it did last year, turned the Region 4 championship game into a bitter ending for the Lady Falcons.

Sedgwick County went on a 17-3 run over the next 6:53 to tie the game for the first of five times in the fourth quarter and three late free throws sealed Front Range Christian’s fate in a 53-50 loss on the campus of the University of Denver.

“They’re taking it pretty hard. They committed themselves after losing last year to do whatever it took to get to the next level. They came to offseason weight training, offseason basketball practice. They literally put in hundreds of hours to get ready for this game. It’s definitely a bitter loss,” Front Range Christian head coach Dominic Vigil said.

The Lady Falcons (21-2) had their season ended by Sedgwick County, 66-59, last season. But when Front Range Christian scored the game’s first six points, trailed for less than a minute early in the second quarter, and eventually built a 39-25 lead on the heels of an 8-1 run in the third quarter it looked as if it was going to avenge that loss. Furthermore, a trip to CSU-Pueblo’s Massari Arena looked inevitable.

Then the bottom fell out. More or less, Sedgwick County point guard Ashley Campbell got the offensive help she needed from Laura Beckman, who scored 12 of her 15 points in the second half, and the Lady Cougars enjoyed a two-to-one advantage from the foul line.

“I don’t know. I think we just got away from fundamentals, made some bad shots and got ourselves in a hole that we couldn’t get out of,” said Vanessa Vigil, who scored a game-high 26 points.

Tori Griffiths added 15 points for the Lady Falcons.

“We told the girls coming into the game we were going to win or lose on basic fundamentals. What happened in the second half is we got a little comfortable with the lead, started realizing that the taste of state was right there. We stopped faking our passes, causing a lot of turnovers, and giving them a lot of easy transition buckets. In the first half, we held them to zero transition buckets.” 

And just like that a state tournament bid slipped just out of reach.

Campbell led Sedgwick County (20-3) with 24 points.