MARBLEHEAD — The St. John’s Prep boys basketball team shook off a slow start and defeated Marblehead, 72-58, Tuesday night at Marblehead High School.
The Eagles fell into an 11-0 hole before going on a run to tie the game at the start of the second quarter.
“I know from playing Marblehead before that they are always well prepared,” Eagles coach John Dullea said. “We have a young team and don’t have as much experience. That might have been a factor in an away game to start the year, but they are a tough defensive and offensive team. It took us a little bit to get going but then we started to get some steals to create some easy scoring opportunities.”
Sophomore Will Batchelder led the way for the Eagles on offense with 31 points.
“Will is a tremendous scorer and player,” Dullea said. “He has been working his tail off. He plays year round and is always working hard in practice. We’ll definitely be looking to him to be a scorer for us this season.”
Despite the loss, juniors Devin Romain (14 points) and Adam Zamansky (15) had solid nights for the Magicians. Overall, Marblehead coach Mike Giardi was happy with his team’s effort against a strong St. John’s team.
“We put up 58 points against a tough team that’s always playing man-to-man defensively, that’s always a good thing,” Giardi said. “We did a good job executing offensively and defensively at times, but against a team like St. John’s you have to do it for 32 minutes. They have enough depth and enough ability and talent that if you just slack off for one minute on either side you will find yourself in trouble.”
The Magicians were able to get off to a good start defensively, but quickly saw their 11-point lead slip away at the end of the first quarter. Batchelder later gave the Eagles their first lead of the game at 18-17 with a three midway through the second.
From there both teams went back and forth with the Eagles taking a 28-27 lead into the half.
In the second half Marblehead had trouble running with St. John’s, eventually trailing 55-35 midway through the third quarter.
“There’s still a lot for us to work on,” Giardi said. “One of the big things is you can see its a 32-minute game and we ran out of gas a little bit. We did some good things but we have a lot of work that we need to do if we want to get to that next level.”
Marblehead was able to go on a small run to cut the deficit to 10 in the fourth but it was too little, too late and St. John’s sealed its first win of the season.
Dullea was happy to see the Eagles (1-0), who have entered the season dealing with injuries to several key players, start the season on a winning note.
“We had to go with a little bit of different game plan than maybe we would have liked to,” Dullea said “We have some injuries right now that we are looking to get through so we didn’t have a ton of size tonight. We wanted to play more up-tempo on defense and that worked for us tonight.”
Marblehead (0-1) will hope to bounce back when the Magicians host rival Swampscott Friday. St. John’s hosts Lowell Friday.
