PEABODY — Pam Gonzalez put on a real show Friday night, and her command performance was more than enough to give the St. Mary’s girls basketball team a comfortable win over Bishop Fenwick.
Gonzalez, a junior transfer from Revere High, scored 30 points and added 10 assists to that total in a dominating performance, and the Spartans defeated the Crusaders, 59-43.
“She did everything for that team tonight,” said Fenwick coach Adam DeBaggis. “She’s good. What else can you say?”
“She’s been building up to this,” said St. Mary’s coach Jeff Newhall. “In her last four games, she’s had 18, 19, 28 and 30 tonight. She’s capable of doing that every night. We believe in her and she’s beginning to believe in herself.”
As the folk at ESPN would say, Gonzalez was en fuego in the first quarter, which ended with a score of Pam Gonzalez 13, Fenwick 12.
And she wasn’t the only Gonzalez with the hot hand either. Freshman Liz Gonzalez scored Fenwick’s first five points, raising the question — if only for a few minutes — whether anyone not named Gonzalez was going to score a point for either team. Finally, Jennie Meagher hit a free throw for Fenwick and ultimately the rest of the players got involved on offense.
The Crusaders, 6-5, proved stubborn and resilient through most of the first half until the very end of the second quarter, when St. Mary’s finished with a 9-1 run thanks to two 3-pointers by Mashayla Johnson and one by Ashley Sullivan. That made the score 28-20 at the break.
“We were right there with them until they hit all those threes at the end of the half,” said DeBaggis.
In the second half, St. Mary’s came out determined to put some distance between itself and the Crusaders and, as DeBaggis said, “we were flat on offense. You can’t win if your shots aren’t falling, and we couldn’t get a lot of ours to go.”
That could have been for a variety of reasons. The Crusaders did go cold for a spell, but St. Mary’s hunkered down on defense too. The key to all that was Olivia Nazaire, who may have only had eight points but controlled play underneath and directed the defense on the floor.
“She does a lot of things you don’t see,” said Newhall. “You see her out there, telling people where to go on defense. She’s our only senior out there, so we count on her a lot.”
The game remained relatively close for the first half of the third quarter, but Pam Gonzalez — who, after her torrid first quarter was scoreless in the second — heated up again, and she sparked a closing 13-2 run to give St. Mary’s (8-3) a 48-28 lead. Defense, said Newhall, was the key factor.
“You’ll notice, we don’t get a lot of steals off our defense, but we try to dictate the pace of the game with it, and we wanted to play a fast game. And we did that tonight.”
For Fenwick, Courtney Norton led the way with 12 points, Liz Gonzalez and Sammi Gallant finished with nine, and Meagher had seven.
The Crusaders are starting to get healthier. Fredi DeGuglielmo is back after having been out much of the season, and DeBaggis said Jaxson Nadeau, who has always been hurt, is rounding into playing shape.
Gabby Torres finished with 10 points for the Spartans.
