Devin Bradshaw is an ASU Cronkite School of Journalism student assigned to coverCesar Chavez High School for AZpreps365.com.

It wasn’t pretty by any stretch of the imagination.

It was a dog fight, haymaker after haymaker was thrown.

This time Cesar Chavez girls’ basketball came out with its hand raised in Thursday night’s play-in game as they used heart, hustle and teamwork to beat Boulder Creek, 45-38.

“We came in ready, locked and loaded,” guard Deshay Turner said. “We knew what we were going up against.

You could tell the Champions had a chip on their shoulder, pregame they had a different passion, the crowd buzzed, and the Champions fed off that.

Maybe a bit too much.

“I don’t think our girls understood early that they weren’t going to steal the ball, they were going to have to force turnovers,” head coach Joe Lee said.

That aggression they played with forced Senior guard Trinity Markham into three first-quarter fouls.

Early in the game, the Jaguars took advantage of the Champions over aggression.

They got to the free-throw line, they made easy passes for easy layups, and it put them in trouble early as Boulder Creek led at the end of the first quarter, 6-9. You could feel something was off with the Champions.

 In the second quarter Cesar Chavez was searching for a spark, and their leading scorer Sophia Doromal foot the bill.  

Down 7-13, the freshman guard got two steals for two fast-break layups and hit a three-point shot that shook the building for Cesar Chavez. Going on a 7-0 run by herself.

“We started to get momentum when I started to get to the hoop,” Doromal said. “We started inching our way back and all of our energy uplifted, it gave us belief.”

The Jaguars had an answer though. With Cesar Chavez gaining momentum and confidence, and a crowd beginning to go wild, an and-1 layup by Boulder Creek’s Kaia Stansberry-Cordova quieted the building.

The frustration began to grow on both sides. Both defenses playing aggressive, not allowing much room for the offenses to operate in comfort, near the end of the first half frustrations boiled over.

A big steal from senior Aniya White led to a hard intentional foul, that left White shaken up.

As the defender stood over her, Turner came to the aid of her teammate. It might’ve been a bit too aggressive, she picked up a technical foul for her trouble. But aggression was on the menu and Turner wasn’t short of it on this night.

“I get frustrated when my teammate is already on the floor, and she pushed her again,” Turner said.

“I got mad, and I pushed her, I shouldn’t have (pushed her). I’ll control that as we go on in the playoffs.”

That moment awoke something in Turner, it awoke something in the Champions. They had a different aggression. A more controlled aggression.

One that led to them taking control of the game.

“I felt like if we were able to speed Boulder Creek up, we could make them uncomfortable,” Lee said.  

The Champions forced the turnovers Lee was looking for, they forced bad passes, they forced the bad shots.

They made Boulder Creek so uncomfortable in the last 2 mins of the game, it was barely able to get the ball past the half-court line and only got a single shot attempt up, with 3 turnovers.

Their pressuring defense only gave up 5 points in the fourth quarter, allowing this Cesar Chavez team to do something no team before them had done and that’s advance past the first round of the state championships.

They felt history calling them, they answered, according to Turner.

They’ll look to make more as they advance further into the tournament.