One.
In the grand scheme of things, it’s a small number.
To Rancho Cotate High School, it’s huge. It’s a start. Maybe it’s a shift in momentum. Hopefully, it’s a cornerstone for something that has been under construction for some time but which is not yet visible to the casual witness.
As of Thursday night, one is the win tally for the Rancho Cotate boys basketball team in North Bay League play this season after the Cougars beat Ukiah on the road in a 70-67 nail-biter.
That victory marked the first time the Cougars have won an NBL boys basketball game since Feb. 8, 2012. They dropped a game against Montgomery in the last league game of 2012 and haven’t won since.
They were 0-10 this season when they boarded the bus to Ukiah Thursday, but 1-10 when they climbed back aboard to revel all the way home.
No wonder Henri Sarlatte’s phone was going nuts.
“It was blowing up,” Rancho’s assistant principal and athletic director said. “The assistant principal texted me. The head coach texted me. The dad who runs the Rancho basketball Twitter account tweeted it out.”
The message: We won.
“It’s a big deal,” he said. “It’s a big deal to the Rancho community.”
It’s not as if the Cougars didn’t know exactly the length of their losing streak.
Senior and team captain Jackson O’Neil said the number — even as it grew — was written, sometimes by players, sometimes by assistant coaches, on the white board before games, along with the X’s and O’s of strategy.
“We kept using it as motivation,” he said.
“It was just our driving force,” O’Neil said. “Our goal has been to get back to winning ways.”
By all accounts, Ukiah didn’t make it easy. Down by 20 at one point, the Wildcats roared back and pushed the Cougars to the limit.
“They just kept chipping and chipping away,” coach Adam Green said. “(Ukiah junior Ulysses Ruiz) was spectacular in those last minutes. We really couldn’t stop him.”
Trailing by three with five seconds on the clock, Ukiah ran a play that skipped the ball from the right flank to the left side, where they had a good look at a 3.
The Cougars held their collective breath.
“When the 3 at the buzzer fell off, they kind of started hooting and hollering and running back and forth, which was fun to see, but we were trying to balance that with, ‘This is an expectation,’” Green said.
Green also said he wanted to be respectful of Ukiah and the fight they brought, especially in the second half.
But I think the Cougars could be forgiven for reveling in the moment. After all, no one on this team had ever won an NBL game before.
Most of them have felt just a handful of hardcourt wins in a Rancho uniform.
When I asked O’Neil about the bus ride home, he laughed.
“It was happy,” he said. “I haven’t experienced that with this team. There have been a lot of downs. (Thursday) night, that was a really good feeling.”
Green said this squad and even the teams that came before deserved a win. There will be more, he said.
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