Sabers hang tough in loss to Pelham

Thursday, January 21, 2010

By JOE MARCHILENA

Correspondent

AMHERST – Members of the Pelham High School boys basketball team can look at Tuesday night’s game against Souhegan High School and say at least they got a win.

The Sabers? They’ve got another 32 minutes of varsity experience under their collective belt.

Souhegan scored just five points through the first 10 minutes of the game and trailed by as many as 15 points in the first half before staging an impressive comeback in the second half of a 44-36 loss to Pelham.

Thanks to a switch on defense to start the second half, and some poor shooting by the Pythons, the Sabers climbed out of that hole and trailed by just one with six minutes left in the game. But Pelham scored eight of the next nine points, and if the Pythons hadn’t gone 3-of-10 from the free throw line down the stretch, they could have put the game away earlier.

“Tonight was a sign of our youth,” Souhegan coach Mike Heaney said. “The last couple of years, our JVs have been so strong that our young guys haven’t had these games. They’ve had regular 20-point wins, and when they get under the bright lights, it’s a little different.”

Pelham’s Stephen Spirou led all scorers with 14 points, despite shooting 6-of-16 from the free throw line. Michael Lombard added 11 points for the Pythons, while Souhegan was led by Devin Gilligan, who had 11 markers.

The Sabers struggled against a Pelham team that, despite its own youth, has given opponents a tough time with its aggressive defense.

“Defensively, we’ve been great holding teams to ridiculously low numbers,” Pelham coach Todd Kress said. “We’ve been that good defensively all year. We really need more out of our offense. I thought we ran well early and we just stopped. We stopped running and turned it into a half-court game, which is what Souhegan wanted.”

For all its running in the first quarter, Pelham still only lead 8-3 after eight minutes. The Pythons turned it up another notch in the second, outscoring the Sabers 16-6 to go ahead 24-9 with 2:47 left before halftime.

Souhegan responded with a run of its own, highlighted by a transition layup by Gilligan as time expired in the first half. The Sabers ended the half on an 8-2 run to pull within nine, and then scored the first six points of the third quarter to cut Pelham’s lead to 26-23.

“They got a couple of baskets at the end of the first half that let them back in,” Kress said. “I thought we had a chance to bury them, but we let them back in. Third quarter, they came out with a lot more intensity than we did.”

Part of the Pythons’ problem was the Sabers’ defense. Heaney had Souhegan switch to a 1-3-1 zone to start the quarter to try to contain Spirou, and for most of the second half, it worked.

“We wanted to make sure when Spirou got the ball, we had a defender on him,” Heaney said. “We didn’t do a good job of that in the first half. We were fortunate he didn’t make his shots.”

Pelham shot just 2-of-15 from the field in the third quarter, with Spirou missing all six of his field goal attempts. An offensive rebound-putback by Gilligan to end the quarter left Souhegan down by four points and a jump shot from the baseline by DJ Petropulos got the Sabers within one, 33-32, with six minutes to go.

But that was as close as Souhegan would get.

“They showed heart and character and maturity, and kind of grew up right in front of us,” Heaney said of his team’s second-half performance.

“All that heart and character goes into making it a one-point game, and then you don’t get the loose ball or the rebound. An experienced program like Pelham gets it.”

The loss was the third in a row for a Souhegan team that had opened the season with four straight wins in Class I.

“Playing with this kind of adversity, they haven’t fought through games like this, they haven’t lost a couple of games in a row,” Heaney said. “They’ve got to pick themselves up off the mat.”