Confident Shiprock Doesn't Mind Being Short

Robert Lapahie plopped on the bench next to me during today's practice.

"We're small, huh?"

That's the first thing he said after we shook hands and said hello.

As I will allude to in tomorrow's paper, Shiprock is a short team. You might even call them a team of Shortys.

They also don't seem bothered by that fact.

I joked with Lapahie: "So you're the power forward, huh?"

He seems like a natural shooting guard, but he said maybe. He's played small forward, power forward, even center and point guard.

"That's one of our weaknesses this season is that we don't have any inside players, but we try to work around that," coach Cliff Johns said. "We try to work with what we have right now. With the quickness that we've got, our ability to have four guards, maybe five guards, with one of our guards able to play the post area."

Besides analyzing Jaron Shorty for my prep newsmaker piece, Johns alluded to several tweaks in his system designed to boost the talents of this particular group of players, utilizing their quickness and familiarity with each other.

He also had something to say about the team's defensive focus:

"We're working on our perimeter defensive pressure. They're getting the fundamentals of the basic concept on the offensive and defensive end and they're catching on real good. Sometimes they get a little out of hand because they want to steal the ball up top. All last week I worked on my guards just keeping their man out front. We're limiting the overplay that normally occurs. I know they're used to that, but with the next couple months we're going to tighten that up.

"We're just chugging along and working on what we need to do to become better as a team. We've just got to keep at it."