Durango’s star players were on full display Tuesday night in the Demons’ 57-33 win over Bayfield. With this victory, the Demons hand 1-1 Bayfield its first loss and will carry a 2-0 record into Farmington’s 2024 Marv Sanders Invitational.
Demon stars Kingston Kerlin and Noah Miles dominated the game in two different ways.
The former, just a sophomore, caught fire almost immediately from behind the 3-point arc. Kerlin drained three three-pointers during the first quarter and five in his scalding 17-point first half, powering DHS to leads of 22-4 through the first quarter and 33-16 through the first half.
The latter, a senior and first team all-league selection last season, swished a triple with 2:07 remaining in the first quarter to increase Durango’s early advantage to 17-4. However, Miles became mostly a facilitator as the game progressed and his shots weren’t falling.
“Noah’s going to see a lot of those looks; when he’d catch the ball he’d have another defender – I think they actually had a spy out there, just spying on Noah; I’ll have to watch film to see if that was true,” Batiste said. “So he made the right read(s) and made some good passes. I always tell him there’s 100, other things you can do, versus being just that knockdown shooter! Once he starts figuring that out we’re going to be a hard team to guard and a hard team to beat.”
Seniors Marcus Cullum and Ethan White dominated the glass.
“Preseason we conditioned a lot, so I feel like we practiced for that,” said junior Brady Hoerl. During a third-quarter sequence, he first sank a corner 3-pointer to extend the Demons’ lead to 38-18 with 5:30 left, then hurried back to record a chase-down block of a probable Wolverine layup.
Kerlin converted an end-to-end steal into two points with 2:39 to go. DHS then outscored Bayfield 7-2 the rest of the way and began the fourth quarter up by an insurmountable 27 points.
BHS senior Isaac Forsythe then nailed back-to-back midrange jumpers and despite a Batiste timeout with 7:03 left in the game, Damon White Thunder’s Wolverines pressed Batiste to burn another after senior Cooper Roderick dropped in a short runner with 5:34 remaining, bringing the guests back to 47-26.
But that would be about as close as Bayfield would get. DHS’ bench would close out the game with a few clutch buckets to slow any momentum the Wolverines tried to gain.
“Defense, rebound and having fun playing defense,” Batiste said. “Those are the three things we’re living by this whole season and for the boys, it’s been a hard time figuring that out. But I’m not worried about offense; we can always draw something up and get something going, get whatever shots we want within the flow of our offense.”
Kerlin finished with a game-high 19 points. White finished with eight points.
Roderick finished with just six points, as did junior Kingston Martinez. Williams and junior Vin McCullough each scored five.
“I’m glad we’ve got two games under our belt to get ready because we’ve got to bring it,” said Batiste. “We’ve got to clean up some things; we still struggled in that second quarter – like we did against Ignacio – but overall I think the boys will fix it. We’ll go over that in practice and get ready for another weekend of basketball!”
Durango began its weekend with a 49-41 win against Kirtland Central on Thursday morning.
