The Dolores Bears (4-15) fell to the Ridgway Demons (11-9) on Tuesday, 59-20, in the Class 2A District 3 tournament play-in game, ending their season.<\/p>\n
The Bears started the game without senior Branden Donaldson, who was suspended after being ejected against Mancos last week, and after starting in his place, senior Josh McCoy left in the first quarter with a dislocated finger.<\/p>\n
The short-handed Bears had trouble tallying points, finishing without a player scoring in the double-digits, while Ridgway got 21 points from senior Grant Saville and 18 from senior Eli Hagemeyer.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo excuses,\u201d head coach Larry Schwartz said of the loss. \u201cWe shot 14-perecent on the game, for whatever reason, we couldn\u2019t get shots to fall.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey out-rebounded us and they didn\u2019t miss very many shots on their own,\u201d he continued. \u201cRidgway, for three quarters, was just on fire.\u201d<\/p>\n
After leading 33-8 at half, the Demons cruised to a 59-20 win to secure a date with Ignacio (17-2) on Friday in the district tournament.<\/p>\n
While the Bears\u2019 final record is settled at 4-15, Schwartz noted how differently things could have played out.<\/p>\n
Of Dolores\u2019 15 losses, nine were by less than 10 points, including one-point losses against Sangre de Cristo (42-41), Telluride (44-43) and a one-point overtime loss to Ridgway (50-49) earlier in the season.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a little disappointing that we couldn\u2019t close the deal on a few of those close games,\u201d said Schwartz. \u201cBut I\u2019m proud of the progress those guys made, the seniors especially, how far they\u2019ve come.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Bears will graduate six seniors from their varsity roster, but Schwartz noted that the freshman and junior varsity teams each finished with winning records, and that his younger players are ready to step up to the varsity level for next year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose freshman boys and sophomores are ready to step up and take control,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we\u2019re pretty excited about that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dolores drops play-in game, ends season<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5770],"tags":[44],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-106513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-high-school-sports","tag-dolores"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106513\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106513"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=106513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}