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Portales routs Artesia

PORTALES - When you're not shooting the ball well, you can stay in a game if you rebound well enough.

If you don't do either one well ... game over, good night, drive home safely.

Portales held visiting Artesia without a basket for a 13:50 stretch in the second half, and dominated the second-half glass to turn a comfortable early lead into a 48-25 rout Friday night to claim the District 4-4A championship.

Taylee Rippee had a double-double with 15 points and 10 rebounds, while sophomore Alexis Ryen added 10 points in a game Portales trailed for less than a minute and led by as many as 25 in the closing seconds.

The win gives Portales a 15-11 record, and it has to wait until Sunday evening to see if that's good enough to get one of the top eight seeds in the 16-team Class 4A field and a home game this weekend.

"MaxPreps has us at ninth," Portales coach Wade Fraze said, "but that's one of six criteria used. I'd like to have a home game, but if we don't, we don't."

If they rebound and defend as well as they did in the second half Friday, the Rams will have a good chance to win just about anywhere. The Rams held Artesia to 3-of-17 shooting and outrebounded them 17-7 in the second half -including 12-2 in the pivotal third-quarter that saw the Portales lead balloon to 22.

"We didn't shoot really well, but I thought we got good shots," Artesia coach Jeff Houghtaling said. "Portales played great defense, and they were aggressive on offense. We didn't do a good job of going to the basket."

Overall, Portales won the battle on the boards 34-22.

"I think we could have won by a lot more if we just blocked out early," said Ryen, a 5-foot-9 sophomore who scored six of her 10 in the second half. It was a point Fraze later echoed, noting it was a key part of the defensive effort to hold the Bulldogs to one shot.

"We also tightened up our defense and played better position defense," Fraze said. "It forced them to take shots from positions they didn't like to take."

Portales' offense was, as expected, a strong dose of Rippee inside, but other Rams stepped up when Artesia combated her with baseline double-teams.

Both teams struggled early, going a combined 5-of-27 from the field with 10 turnovers.

"I would say that's because of defense, because Artesia is a very good defense team," Fraze said. "When we played at their place, we had 28 turnovers. Tonight we had 12. We had some unforced turnovers, but not strings of them unforced."

Paityn Houghtaling led the Bulldogs with eight points. Coach Houghtaling assumes Artesia will fall somewhere in the 9-11 range and either one or two seeds behind Portales.