Bloody injury overshadows M-A’s CCS loss

Gray did not suffer a concussion, according to Yob after a postgame visit to Stanford Emergency Care. She got to her feet and ran quickly out of the gymnasium under her own power, leaving a trail of blood all the way to the locker room. She underwent two rounds of stitches over her right eye.

“I just saw a lot of blood,” Yob said. “It was bleeding. I just wanted to get Molly up off the court and get her to a trainer. But if it’s going to happen to anybody, Molly’s going to take that thing the best. So, yeah, we ran back [to the locker room], we got a trainer ... and, yeah, there was a lot of blood. But she was tough.”

Gray exited midway through the fourth quarter with the Bears trailing 33-25. M-A kept pace, and was down 36-28 when Gray re-entered the gym with 2:22 to play wearing a massive bandage wrapped around her head. Yob said Gray wanted to return to the game but the training staff refused.

“She’s a competitor,” Yob said following the game. “She’s the toughest girl I know. She wanted to get back into the game. It’s just, she’s going to get stitches right now. It’s a big cut above her eye. She wanted to go back in and the trainers had to tell her ‘no.’ ... That’s who she is. She’s going to leave it all out there on the floor.”

M-A cut it to 36-30 on the following play with a takeaway by sophomore Isabelle Habibi for a transition bucket. It was as close as the Bears would get, as Los Gatos responded by closing the game on a 6-0 run.

“We were really sad,” M-A junior Lita Fakapelea said of the loss in the Bears’ first return to the CCS finals since 2019-20. “We wanted to win for Molly after the injury. We thought we could have won the game for her and it didn’t really turn out how we wanted to.”

The Bears never led in the game after Los Gatos opened on a 17-2 run, extended into the second quarter. Yob said it was one of the worst starts he’s ever witnessed this season.

“Definitely,” Yob said. “It started off very slow. ... It’s tough to come back from 17-2. The girls battled, but not the ideal start there.”

Fakapelea and junior Luisa Tava came off the bench to give M-A a spark, especially in the second half. Tava finished with a team-high eight points while Fakapelea scored six, and senior starter Avary Sheldon added six.

The No. 1-seed Wildcats (19-8) used 12 feet, 3 inches of vertical real estate to dominate in the first half. The NCAA Division I committed twin towers of 6-1 senior Nicole Steiner (UC Fullerton) and 6-2 senior Ashley Childers (Cornell) led the way. Childers finished with a game-high 15 points, while Steiner totaled eight points and a game-high 12 rebounds.

No. 3 M-A (19-8) scored its first points of the game nearly three minutes in on a layup from senior Crystal Guerra Herrera. It would stand as the only field goal for the Bears in the first quarter, as Los Gatos went to the second with a 15-2 lead.

Relying on lofty lob passes, plenty of touches, and their extreme height advantage, the Wildcats showed off even more tools in their arsenal when junior guard Rita Zhou drilled a corner 3 with 2:04 to go in the half on an assist pass from Steiner. It just seemed unfair that Los Gatos could stretch the floor with such alacrity, as Steiner’s pass was launched from deep in one corner, soared over the cylinder to the other corner, where Zhou was locked and loaded for the splash down to make it 24-5.

The Wildcats took a 25-10 lead into halftime, but an energized M-A squad began chiseling away with a 10-5 run to start the second half. The Bears’ switch to man-to-man defense paid off, and M-A’s players began getting bodies into Steiner and Childers like they had nothing to lose.

“We just went to man, and then just ball pressure,” Yob said. “We wanted to get ball pressure so they couldn’t get to the bigs, double the bigs, help on some of the other girls.”

Los Gatos’ 40.5% shooting efficiency was too much to overcome, however. M-A shot just 28.6% from the field, with just five made 3s. The driving lanes were nonexistent, as M-A scored just one layup in the half-court set all night.

“Some of our decision maybe was a little off,” Yob said. “I felt like we could have swung the ball more. It was either we shot it when we shouldn’t have, or we passed it when I thought we should have taken the shot. ... We like to settle for 3s too much. We could have drove it to the basket a little bit more.”

Fakapelea said the team thought a comeback was in reach.

“We thought we were going to catch up after the second half,” Fakapelea said. “We knew that we could come back after 15 points down. We’ve come back before, like over 20 points, and we thought we could catch up.”

M-A outscored Los Gatos 20-17 in the second half.

“I just love the energy we brought,” Yob said. “I just thought our team was competing. They were giving it a shot — right? Whatever was going to happen, they were going to give it a hundred percent. They were flying around. So, we’ll live with the results afterward. ... It was a little spark, and we needed it. But at the end they took it away.”

By virtue of reaching the CCS finals, M-A qualifies for the CIF State Basketball Championships. The Bears drew the No. 12 seed in the Division III tournament, and will open on the road Tuesday at No. 5 Ponderosa-Shingle Springs. Tip-off is 7 p.m.