PENACOOK — Pembroke Academy boys’ basketball coach Mike Donnell almost looks queasy when he hears his players say this season is championship or bust.
On Wednesday night, that discomfort was validated after his team had to overcome a three-point halftime deficit on the road to beat Merrimack Valley, 55-47.
“They came out, and they came to win,” Donnell said of the Pride’s performance.
“We rushed things in the first half. We gave the ball away nine times in the first half. You can’t win basketball games like that.”
MV (0-1) started the game on a 6-0 run and held the Spartans (1-0) scoreless through the first three minutes. The full-court press significantly hampered Pembroke’s ability to move the ball up the floor without turning it over.
“We had to remember our press breaker, because we had two guys out of position,” Donnell said. “When you’re doing press breaker, if you have one guy (in) the wrong spot, it screws up the whole thing.”
However, the Pride also didn’t capitalize on those turnovers as frequently as they could’ve, missing several layups on breakaways.
“The kids worked their tails off,” MV head coach Tim Mucher said. “(But) they’d steal it, and they give it right back to the other team. We didn’t punish them on the scoreboard. We let ’em stay around. I think we should’ve been up double figures before half, which we weren’t.”
The Pride led the entire first half. Pembroke tied the score at 22 early in the third quarter and slowly started to pull away. MV didn’t score until nearly 4½ minutes into the third.
Ultimately, some timely three-pointers and free throws sealed the deal for the visiting Spartans. Though MV gave the visitors a scare – cutting what was a 10-point lead to a four-point game with about 90 seconds remaining – Pembroke’s Mike Strazzeri connected on both ends of a one-and-one to ice the game.
After the win, Donnell said he probably had several players who scored “some points” – Strazzeri had 11, Joe Fitzgerald had 14, Josh Pilotte had 13 – but he was more impressed with a couple of his bench players.
“Jacob Boisvert, who did not start tonight, came in, got a few minutes in the first half. He made a couple of big steals, made a couple of great passes and had a couple of huge shots,” Donnell said. “I thought (he) played as good as I’ve ever seen him play.”
Donnell continued: “I thought another sub, Adam Heldman played a great game. He ran our press breaker a lot better.”
On the other side, MV’s Brandon Dukette led all scorers in the game with 24 points. He just didn’t get enough help from his teammates down the stretch.
Mucher said overall, he was pleased with his team’s performance in their first game, but there’s still lots to clean up.
“The basics: making layups, close-outs in a timely manner, turning the ball over,” he said of the errors that stood out. “It kind of bit us in the back end tonight.”
Now that both teams have their first-game jitters out of the way, they’ll prepare to settle into a long season. And for a Pembroke group that has especially high hopes for the 2022-23 season, Wednesday night served as a humbling reminder that thinking too far ahead could derail those aspirations.
“First thing I take from this game is to remind my guys that it’s one game at a time before you can win a championship,” Donnell said. “You can’t just say, ‘Championship or bust,’ until you get to that big game. They gotta take every game one game at a time.
“MV was a tough team. They played hard. But there’s a lot of tough teams out there that we might not get those same breaks (against), so what I’m taking out of this is plain and simple: We still got a lot of work to do. And it’ll start tomorrow.”