First, the home victory over the class 4A Panthers demonstrated that the Bears are capable of competing with anyone, including teams above their classification.<\/p>\n
Second, the victory signified a moment of growth for a young Bears team composed of two seniors, four juniors and five underclassmen.<\/p>\n
And finally, the win was important because it only became possible after several role players stepped up to assist Bears super-senior Brianna Schwartz.<\/p>\n
Unsure of how they would match up against the Class 4A Panthers, the Bears played well early, sprinting to a 13-12 first-quarter lead before entering the lockeroom at halftime with the score deadlocked 27-27.<\/p>\n
Riding the stellar play of Schwartz throughout in the second half, the Bears opened up a lead during the third quarter, pulling ahead 41-35 entering the fourth.<\/p>\n
The Panthers proved to be far from done however, and after falling behind by eight points early in the fourth, roared back to pull within one point with under a minute to go.<\/p>\n
Largely as a result of the strong rebounding of junior Taylor Elder and the clutch free throw shooting of sophomore Larissa Umberger, the Bears managed to hold on after a three-pointer by Yanibah Bayles late in the fourth quarter clanged off the rim.<\/p>\n
Leading the Bears with a season-high 26 points in the contest was Schwartz, who, once again, proved herself to be one of the top players in the San Juan Basin League.<\/p>\n
With their record now at 5-3, the Bears will return to the practice floor in preparation for a Jan. 18 home matchup against Nucla. The game is slated to begin at 3:30 p.m.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
First, the home victory over the class 4A Panthers demonstrated that the Bears are capable of competing with anyone, including teams above their classification. Second, the victory signified a moment of growth for a young Bears team composed of two seniors, four juniors and five underclassmen. And finally, the win was important because it only […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":122025,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6362],"tags":[188],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-122024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ds-sports","tag-dolores-star"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122024","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=122024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122024"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=122024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}