Like too many Arizona teachers, Williams’ Phillip Echeverria has too many jobs to savor his personal accomplishments.

“In a small school district, we’re doing whatever needs to be done,” explained the high school’s athletic director and coordinator of the Route 66 Classic basketball tournaments, which concluded Saturday, Dec. 4, with his Vikings winning the boys championship in his first season as head coach. “I love the students in this district, the faculty, and the administration. So I’m happy to serve these kids we have here.”

Still, even after the Vikings’ athletic director had awarded the title trophy to his team following its 59-47 victory over El Capitan High School, he was already looking to their Dec. 7 rematch.

“It’s game-by-game: If we look beyond the next game, we’re not going to be where we want to be at the end of the year,” said the high school’s teacher of three physical education classes as well as its head coach in girls basketball, to which he had given his team the runner-up trophy for its second-place finish earlier Dec. 4. “Tuesday’s game’s more important than this one. 

“I hate matching up with them another day--playing at El Cap[itan] is always tough--[but] I’m hoping that we can go up there and take another.”

His presentation of the Classic’s Most Valuable Player award to his senior guard, Oryn Orozco, whose title-game contributions came off the bench and were tied for a distant third in the scorebook with Williams junior Danny Siegfried, showed Echeverria wasn’t too busy to recognize the most deserving of his players.

After his defense helped the Vikings rally from a one-point deficit and ensure senior Isaiah Bradshaw would be the only Eagle to score in the third quarter, Orozco all but silenced the El Capitan leading scorer in the fourth, holding him to a lone field goal. 

Echeverria banked on making the rest of the Eagles, including fellow all-tournament selections Nathan Barlow and Aydan Holm, beat the Vikings press, in their gym, with their height advantage. 

Short answer: They couldn’t.

“I think it’s a fair statement that we’ve got some kids that have some quickness,” Echeverria said. “We’re going to use that to our advantage, in our press and in what we’re doing offensively.”

While Bradshaw finished with a team-leading 13, Holm had nine points and Barlow hit two fourth-quarter three-pointers to keep one behind the game-high total by Williams sophomore Nickoli Cody, the only other El Capitan offense in the second half came on a fourth-quarter putback by junior post Solomon Barlow, a load on the glass all game.

“Both of us played four games, so we’re both a little tired,” Echeverria said of the teams’ two straight days of pool and bracket play spread out over four games each, three of which the Eagles won at Ash Fork High School by at least 37 points. “They might be a little more tired than we were.”

A notion Eagles head coach Derek Stransky didn’t dispute after the fourth game, a semifinal with a 10 p.m. tip Friday, Dec. 3, at Williams, in which California’s Needles High School took El Capitan to the limit before falling, 56-50.

“Needles challenged us, definitely,” he said. “That game stuck with us. We kind of knew certain teams would have quickness like that, [but] we’ve got to box out more.”

Cody combined with steady 6-foot, 3-inch senior Preston Ford for 25 points from the perimeter, including the go-ahead bucket halfway through the third quarter that put Williams in the lead for good, 30-29. Two minutes prior, Ford drew his fourth foul and had to sit, but he managed to avoid disqualification the rest of the way.

“It’s disappointing: We discussed that after we got into foul trouble a little bit,” Echeverria said, in the Vikings’ Friday, Dec. 3, blowouts of BASIS Flagstaff and Ray. “What’s nice is that it created an opportunity for others to step up in his place, and we had a couple of young men do that.”

Namely, Cody, Orozco and fellow senior Xavier Shepard, named to the all-tournament team along with Ford. Orozco would hit four of his six free throw opportunities, while Shepard and Echeverria’s son, J.P., a sophomore, would hit threes to close the period on a 14-7 run.

“In practice, we’re running,” Echeverria said. “We want to get up and down the floor, put the ball in the basket, get a stop, then get it back and do it again.

From there, Siegfried and Cody broke the back of the Eagles. Cody’s three was followed, a minute into the final period, by two straight fateful rebounding lapses on the part of El Capitan, as Siegfried successfully followed his own miss of a three-point shot on back-to-back possessions, scoring an and-one and a baseline five-footer, respectively, to open up a double-digit lead, 47-37.

“That’s our best rebounder,” Echeverria said of his junior forward. “Hitting the threes that we hit earlier really made them extend out, so they’re going for the block instead, and we g[o]t an outstanding follow of the shot[s].”

Although Holm responded with a three-point play the old-fashioned way of his own to contract the lead to eight points, junior post Bryton Cox’s rare three from the perimeter bounced in, ensuring the Vikings’ lead would never again dip below double digits, with Orozco’s up-and-under layup finalizing the scoring.