Benefield: For Rancho Cotate boys basketball team, one win never felt so good

One.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s a small number.

To Rancho Cotate High School, it’s huge. It’s a start. Maybe it’s a shift in momentum. Hopefully, it’s a cornerstone for something that has been under construction for some time but which is not yet visible to the casual witness.

As of Thursday night, one is the win tally for the Rancho Cotate boys basketball team in North Bay League play this season after the Cougars beat Ukiah on the road in a 70-67 nail-biter.

That victory marked the first time the Cougars have won an NBL boys basketball game since Feb. 8, 2012. They dropped a game against Montgomery in the last league game of 2012 and haven’t won since.

They were 0-10 this season when they boarded the bus to Ukiah Thursday, but 1-10 when they climbed back aboard to revel all the way home.

No wonder Henri Sarlatte’s phone was going nuts.

“It was blowing up,” Rancho’s assistant principal and athletic director said. “The assistant principal texted me. The head coach texted me. The dad who runs the Rancho basketball Twitter account tweeted it out.”

The message: We won.

“It’s a big deal,” he said. “It’s a big deal to the Rancho community.”

It’s not as if the Cougars didn’t know exactly the length of their losing streak.

Senior and team captain Jackson O’Neil said the number - even as it grew - was written, sometimes by players, sometimes by assistant coaches, on the white board before games, along with the X’s and O’s of strategy.

“We kept using it as motivation,” he said.

“It was just our driving force,” O’Neil said. “Our goal has been to get back to winning ways.”

By all accounts, Ukiah didn’t make it easy. Down by 20 at one point, the Wildcats roared back and pushed the Cougars to the limit.

“They just kept chipping and chipping away,” coach Adam Green said. “(Ukiah junior Ulysses Ruiz) was spectacular in those last minutes. We really couldn’t stop him.”

Trailing by three with five seconds on the clock, Ukiah ran a play that skipped the ball from the right flank to the left side, where they had a good look at a 3.

The Cougars held their collective breath.

“When the 3 at the buzzer fell off, they kind of started hooting and hollering and running back and forth, which was fun to see, but we were trying to balance that with, ‘This is an expectation,’” Green said.

Green also said he wanted to be respectful of Ukiah and the fight they brought, especially in the second half.

But I think the Cougars could be forgiven for reveling in the moment. After all, no one on this team had ever won an NBL game before.

Most of them have felt just a handful of hardcourt wins in a Rancho uniform.

When I asked O’Neil about the bus ride home, he laughed.

“It was happy,” he said. “I haven’t experienced that with this team. There have been a lot of downs. (Thursday) night, that was a really good feeling.”

Green said this squad and even the teams that came before deserved a win. There will be more, he said.

“It’s a little bit more validation to the work that they’ve been putting in,” Green said. “These guys have been working their tails off trying to bring this thing back. This shows what’s been going on.”

Green, who took about two weeks off in January for the birth of his daughter, credited assistant coaches Dylan Rossini and James Slade for steering the ship in his absence. Credit, too, he said, goes to freshman coach Mike Washington and JV coach Sean Sage for adding to a competitive culture of Rancho basketball, he said.

“It’s a growth mindset,” he said. “We are going to get better every day and let the chips fall where they may. The win was a byproduct of doing things the right way.”

Sarlatte has seen it building.

“I think we’ve been in a lot more games this year than we’ve been in the last few years,” he said.

When you have lost 67 leaguegames in a row, simply being in the hunt for a win can feel like validation.

“We’ve been playing some good games,” O’Neil said. “To finally get this win, we are only going forward.”

It was with that forward focus that Green stopped writing the number of games in the winless streak on the white board after the first league game of the season.

If somebody else did it, OK, but he wanted to keep eyes forward instead of backward. Plus, that number was pretty darned big.

“I think it was a little too overwhelming,” he said.

But on Thursday night, after the game, Green went back to white board.

“I wrote a ‘67’ and crossed it out and put a ‘1’ up there to indicate we are on a one-game winning streak,” he said.

Suddenly, the lil’ ol’ number one seems downright huge.

You can reach staff columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com, on Twitter @benefield and on Instagram at kerry.benefield. Podcasting on iTunes and SoundCloud “Overtime with Kerry Benefield.”