The Mascenic boys’ basketball team got their season on track with their first win Monday night, ringing in the holidays by beating visiting Franklin.
The Vikings lost three straight games to open the season, but they figured it out Monday; after falling behind in the third quarter, Mascenic locked down the visitors, turned them over, and ran away with it.
“We just picked up our defensive intensity,” Mascenic head coach Matt Hagar said after the 69-58 win. “We’ve been working on it all year. Tough three games to start, and then it turned on. That’s the kind of team we are — when we play good defense, we’re gonna be tough to beat.”
The visiting Golden Tornadoes decked the halls with three-balls on “ugly sweater night” in New Ipswich, hitting 12 threes and staying hot in a back-and-forth game before taking a good lead in the third thanks to Nathan Holmes (17 points), Cody Williams (18 points) and Matthew Carlsen (16 points).
“They’re aggressive,” Hagar said of the opponents. “They’re not backing down. … They fight hard. That’s a good group of kids right there.”
Franklin ended the third quarter up six, 51-45, but that was when Mascenic applied the clamps. The Vikings held the Tornadoes to just seven points in the fourth quarter, while hometowners Cayden Emerson (game-high 20 points) Chuck Phillips (12 points), Colin Koukkari (12 points) and Parker Ketola (10 points) got it done on offense, and it was out of reach quickly.
“We want to get downhill, we want to get going,” Hagar said, “and then we’re going turn you over and score off the turnover. That’s our goal.”
Mascenic opened with a loss to Concord Christian and two against Newmarket before their first win, and the regular-season schedule doesn’t get much easier; their next game is in the new year against undefeated Profile. They will have a chance to improve before then, however, at the Keene holiday tournament. With Conant no longer participating in the interdivisional regional basketball rivalry against Mascenic, fans’ only chance to see the Vikings and Orioles square off may well be this Thursday, the 26th, when the two open play at Keene State College at 3 p.m. The Vikings are led by three strong senior captains — Chuck Phillips, Wesley Desrosiers and TJ Edgar — and Hagar said he couldn’t have asked for better leaders.
“They all bring a sense of leadership in their own way,” Hagar said. “Some are more vocal, some lead by play, but they all can step in at any time and take over a locker room and make things known or fix things that I don’t need to address. That’s what I look for in a leader: an extension of me, and all three of those guys can do that.”
