CSM women’s basketball on 9-game win streak

“I really think during COVID our administration and our athletic director really fought to find a way to get us onto campus … to practice the games safely,” Warner said.

Warner’s post-COVID Bulldogs have been a success story in their own right. Coming out of the lost COVID year of 2020-21 — when the CCCAA canceled the entire season — CSM returned to open on a 10-game winning streak.

While the Bulldogs didn’t officially practice during the COVID closures as per state health guidelines, Warner’s players found ways to practice outdoors. Warner said she was in communication via constant video conference calls to stay involved while keeping her distance.

“So, we literally kept practicing that whole entire time, and I think it really gave all our teams a jump-start,” Warner said.

When the Bulldogs take the court Wednesday night at home in non-conference action against West Los Angeles, they will have a chance to match last season’s 10-game winning streak. CSM has won nine in a row, starting with a Nov. 19 victory over Cuesta at the Folsom Lake College tournament.

The Bulldogs have now been winning for more than a month, most recently knocking off Sacramento City 66-41 at home Saturday night.

“Last year and this year are definitely the best starts we’ve had in a long time,” Warner said.

Yet the two teams are dramatically different. CSM returned just three players this season, including just one starter in 5-3 guard Tiare Novero-Paaga.

“Last year, we had a pretty good start too but it’s almost an entirely different team,” Warner said.

Warner raves about the parity of her squad.

Using a rotation of 10 or 11 players every game, the balance in scoring has been a consistent trait of this year’s run of success. Freshman guard Jayonnah Carter leads the team averaging 11.6 points per game. After Carter, there isn’t much of a drop-off, with Novero-Paaga averaging 9.0 ppg; sophomore forward Venus-Miari Pascua 7.1 ppg; sophomore forward Mikaela Nava 6.9 ppg; sophomore guard Jill David 5.5 ppg; and freshman sixth-man Joslyn Moore 7.1 ppg.

“They don’t really care, and that’s what I like about this team,” Warner said. “They’re really unselfish, sometimes to a fault. … They really are a unit. And that’s what makes them so fun to coach.”

Defense has been the Bulldogs’ bread and butter, allowing just 48.9 points per game, ranking fourth in the state, and second in Northern California.

It’s no coincidence the three top performances in terms of team steals were the first three games of the current winning streak. Of the nine wins, CSM has had double-digit takeaways in six of them, including 15 in the most contentious win, a 49-45 back-and-forth battle Dec. 9 against Santa Barbara.

The Santa Barbara win was one of the few games of the winning streak CSM trailed late. But it was tied 42-42 when the Bulldogs woke up, and Novero-Paaga missed a corner 3 and David grabbed a rare offensive rebound to score the go-ahead layup.

“That was a big swing because we had gone a while without scoring,” Warner said.

The score fueled a run for the Bulldogs, as David followed with a midrange jumper, and Novero-Paaga followed with a sharp assist pass to David on a backdoor drive.

“Those were three really big baskets at the end that really put us up, and we finally hit some free throws,” Warner said.

Good health over the past month has also been a blessing. Prior to the current winning streak, CSM lost three in a row. During that stretch, an unlucky string of concussions affecting the Bulldogs’ roster, with three players suffering concussions from three unrelated instances.

Novero-Paaga opened the year on the injured list after suffering a concussion when taking a charge in a preseason scrimmage. Then, the day before CSM left for the Monterey Peninsula College Crossover tournament, where the losing streak started Nov. 11, freshman guard Ariel Petalver got struck in the head from close range with a basketball and suffered a concussion. Jordan then suffered a concussion Nov. 12 in the final game of the Monterey Peninsula Crossover.

“So I never had my full crew until we started winning,” Warner said.

All three players have returned to action. And the Bulldogs are off and running.

Or, according to Warner’s theory, CSM is simply doing what all its sports teams have been doing since returning from the COVID cancelations.

“That’s just my theory,” Warner said. “I could be wrong. But I think it really did give us a leg up.”