Bloodhounds Scalped

At the end of the first quarter it felt like the St. Joseph girls basketball team had thoughts of a monumental upset against No. 3 San Antonio Antonian.

Unfortunately, visiting Antonian had some ideas of its own.

The Lady Apaches (16-5, 1-0) hit five shots from behind the arc and held the Bloodhounds to a mere two points in the second quarter. The second stanza started an avalanche that St. Joseph (17-4, 0-1) couldn’t run away from as it fell 70-40 in its TAPPS District 4-6A opener at home Wednesday afternoon.

“I think very highly of St. Joseph Brownsville,” Apache coach Breck Ross said. “They are a very ag-gressive group, they work really hard, and we started off the game behind. We love coming to play here because it’s a rowdy atmosphere, the fans get into it and there’s a lot of intensity.”

The Bloodhounds were up 15-11 with 12.3 seconds left in first quarter but Apaches senior guard Jas-mine Malone squared up and drained a three-pointer as time expired to cut the lead to 15-14.

Malone’s basket seemed to spark the Apache’s offensive as it came out firing in the second, scoring eight-straight points that included treys from Sarah Figueroa and Elizabeth Boyd. Figueroa also went three-for-four from downtown to help the Apaches outscore the Bloodhounds 23-2 before the half.

“Liz (Boyd) has been shooting well (and) she’s been consistent all year long,” Ross said. “Sarah has come back from an injury and she’s been hitting some shots for us. Luckily they’ve been falling but we don’t want to live by the three because we’ll die by it, but luckily some shots were falling and it helped us get that momentum going into halftime.”

Malone was part of five players who reached double figures for the Apaches and lead the team in scor-ing with 19 points.

“They have tons of weapons to go to,” Bloodhounds coach Cynthia Martinez said. “Malone, she’s a pretty tough kid. She’s spreads the ball out. She does a lot of damage (scoring) and the overall damage (her all-around game), that’s hard to stop.”

Paulina Martinez led the Bloodhounds with 11 points, eight of which came in the first quarter during St. Joseph’s temporary lead.

When asked if the buzzer beating 3-pointer affected the team Martinez said that it had no barring on the girl’s demeanor.

“No, not at all,” Martinez said. “I made a comment to our assistant coaches (and) I was like that didn’t hurt us. Usually you can really see that happen physically with their attitude and the way they play and I didn’t see that today. I felt like as much as they did hit three pointers and really do things that would deflate a team usually, I didn’t see that with us today so that was good, I felt like that was one of our big-gest pluses today.”