Santa Fe High boys basketball upsets Capital

Santa Fe High head coach David Rodriguez floated the idea of having his Demons, the district’s fourth seed, face No. 5 Los Alamos at 5 p.m. Monday night, then have Capital and Bernalillo square off immediately afterward. Both games would be in Toby Roybal Memorial Gymnasium.

Either way, he said, Saturday’s result is a win not only for his team, but maybe the district’s as a whole.

“To play with the best, you have to be at your best, and this was a game where we had to step to the challenge,” he said.

At 12-14, 3-5, Santa Fe High looked to be dead in the water in a game it absolutely had to have. Down 57-54 in the final 10 seconds, the Demons appeared to cough up their last chance when guard Wyatt Honstein lost the ball out of bounds on a baseline drive with 8.1 seconds left.

Two steals off inbound passes led to two layups in the final six seconds, stunning the Capital crowd and sending the Santa Fe High players into a mid-court frenzy. In the middle of it all was Nicholas, the team’s leading scorer this season but a player who struggled with his shot all night.

He finished with 11 points. Honstein had a game-high 24 while Tres Chaires had 18. Mikey Lopez had a team-high 21 for Capital.

Nicholas’ birthday gift came in the form of Capital’s generosity. Jordan Booth-Homer cut it to 57-56 with a steal on an inbounds pass. His layup came with 6.5 seconds left, but the referees added a half second to the clock and had the Jaguars inbound the ball again from under their own basket.

Coming out of a timeout, Lopez inexplicably heaved a baseball pass three-fourths of the way down the court. The ball bounced once, caromed off the backboard and landed in Nicholas’ hands. He drove through traffic the entire length of the court and scored at the buzzer.

“I’m not sure what I was thinking except that there really wasn’t time to set something up,” Nicholas said. “All I knew was I had four fouls and my job was to cover the guy up top. When I saw the pass coming, I was kind of surprised. I just ran after it and, well, that’s it, I guess.”

I want to get somewhere and I need directions, and I don’t want to easily get distracted with news or a game. It’s lunch time; I want to eat and want to know which restaurant I should pick, so I pull up reviews – I don’t want to easily get lost in my email at that time. If I am responding to an email, it is going to be short and I am not going to switch to another app until I am done (I might on the desktop). I have downtime waiting in line, so I cut ropes, slash fruits or crush pigs with my nimble fingers. I am in bed, and I want to catch my news quickly. It is all about making decisions quickly. Mind share enables that.

This has led to an inherent difference from the web – the “one-thing” mobile app ecosystem versus the “many-thing” web. You have to look no further than the growth of the app economy where four out of every five minutes on a phone are being spent on an app. Or consider Apple’s recent announcement of 40 billion downloads, half of which were in 2012 alone.

On web, mobile or any business, companies always work hard to differentiate with that one thing with which they want to capture the user’s imagination. When you capture imagination, you get attention, and when you get attention, you get engagement, which leads to loyalty. Whether it is on mobile, web or consoles, everything else must be built and extended to protect that one thing – Gmail, Google+ and YouTube are all examples of Google protecting search. Facebook Camera and Poke are efforts to protect photo sharing on Facebook.

But what has changed with mobile is that no (large) company has been able to pull off a “fast follow” to unseat the incumbent startup who has mind share with that one differentiated thing. Some just chose to acquire the mobile startup instead – Twitter bought Tweetie and Zynga bought Words with Friends, for example.

It became evident with Facebook’s recent attempt to Poke a hole in Snapchat’s market share. Or Facebook pursuing Instagram; Twitter or Yahoo/Flickr adding filters to pursue Instagram users; Facebook (killed Places after one year of launch) or Yelp chasing Foursquare with checkins; or Apple’s iMessage and the continuing growth of WhatsApp. With almost 263 million monthly active users, Rovio comes very close to the 311 million MAU for all of Zynga. Furthermore, now we are starting to see startups that had the first-mover advantage grow even further when a larger company tried to do the same “one thing.” The barrier of entry is that mind share.

It was and is still very different in the “many-thing,” non-mobile world. We saw Myspace come from behind and dethrone Friendster and then Facebook come from behind to remove Myspace. Gmail followed fast and took on Hotmail and Yahoo Mail successfully. Internet Explorer decimated Netscape and now Firefox and Chrome are giving IE a run for its money on the desktop. Microsoft persisted with Xbox and is a leading console now. RedBox, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video are nipping away successfully at Netflix.

Before, every startup when raising capital was invariably asked the dreaded questions, “What if Microsoft or Google built this?” and more recently, “What if Facebook built this?” Now in mobile, if that is the question your startup is asked, you are in luck because it implies that you are first to market with a differentiated product. And if a “fast-follow” attempt happens, it will probably validate your product further, highlight your effort and help you gather even more mind share leading to further market share. Believe it or not, the best thing that can happen to a startup in the mobile space today is a big company copying it.