The Centurions are 4-1 to open the new season, and through the beginning of the season, senior guard Jasmine Garcia has broken the Saugus High School record for the most 3-point shots made in five games.
Garcia, who’s shot 26 threes to open the year, is shooting 52% from beyond the arc along with averaging 16 points per game.
In the team’s last win over Knight High School of Palmdale on Monday, the senior scored 18 points along with three blocks.
“Coming into this year was a big test in that I could give them a lot of freedom to be able to read and react to what the opposing team’s defense kind of gave us and just play basketball,” Saugus head coach Anthony Falasca said.
Falasca said this season’s roster has seven seniors and that every player has been on the varsity roster since they were freshman.
“Some of these girls have played 100-plus varsity games, not including the summer and fall seasons and spring ball,” he said. “If you include those, you’re probably at 120 to 150 varsity-level games. And so, a majority of them have ran my system, in our system for three years.”
With his players having tenure on the roster and familiarity having played together, Falasca is confident in his team this season and what they can accomplish, especially after a strong start to the year.
“Previous years, we’ve kind of gone a little bit lighter on competition, and I think we got to the playoffs, and it really didn’t help us in playing higher-level teams,” he said. “So, we wanted to start the season off with four Division 1 teams from last year.”
The Centurions opened the season with wins over Chaminade and the Camarillo Scorpions last week and extended their winning streak to three games with a victory over St. Joseph of Santa Maria.
Although the team lost to the Ventura Cougars, Falasca said the defeat was more of a fatigue issue as the Centurions opened the year with four straight games in four days.
And while he’s confident he won’t be doing that again, the team learned from the loss in what he believes will make Saugus better long term.
“I probably won’t do that again in the next coming years,” he said jokingly. “But they left the game knowing that we battled from an effort standpoint of these girls know that I don’t coach effort. They gave me everything they had. They ran through as many walls as they could, and then we just, we just kind of gassed out towards the end.”
The Centurions bounced back from the loss with a 60-29 win over Knight on Monday with senior point guard EvaMarie Rios leading all Saugus scorers with 10 points along with six assists, seven rebounds and four steals.
Moving forward, Falasca believes the Foothill League title is theirs to lose this season but not without some trouble from the rest of the league as he thinks this is the best the Santa Clarita Valley has been in years.
“2020 was the last time that we got a league title, and we had to share it. And I’ve never liked sharing since I was a kid,” he said. “We expect to win league outright this year. We want to go 12-0 in league. That’s our first goal for the season. And I think to get to that point, we needed to see how we would compete against high-level teams.”
The Centurions play again on Tuesday on the road at Castaic with tip-off scheduled for 5 p.m.
