East Palestine finishes perfect season in ITCL

By John Bassetti

EAST PALESTINE — Their schools are about 9 miles apart via Ohio route 170, but, in boys basketball, East Palestine and Springfield are about 21 points apart.

That’s East Palestine’s margin of victory in two games against Springfield this season after Wednesday’s 66-55 win that completed a 14-0 Inter Tri-County League Tier One record.

“To the best of my knowledge, it’s the only team in Palestine history to run the table in the league,” said coach Tom Bingham. “That’s a credit to our kids.

“I was a little surprised at the number of points we scored [Wednesday] because, up there it was 45-35,” Bingham said of his Bulldogs’ 10-point win over the Tigers on Feb. 5.

Ben Gysin had 21 points and Trevor Reiser 20 to lead East Palestine, which wrapped up the tier title last Friday. The Bulldogs made 55 percent of its goals (25 of 45).

Bingham said that the Bulldogs (16-2) have had 16 wins in four of the last five seasons — with a 15-win season being the other.

“We’ve still got goals to play for,” Bingham said, like most number of regular-season wins in a season — 18, if attained.

“And we’re still trying to build momentum for the tournament,” the coach said of playing Brookfield at East Palestine on Tuesday and Canton Heritage at Malone College next Friday to finish the regular season.

“Our kids did a nice job of holding their composure when things weren’t quite going our way,” Bingham said of Wednesday’s game.

“When things weren’t going our way, we’d call a timeout and regroup. We’ve got four seniors for the most part and they’ve been around the block.”

The 6-foot-5 Gysin was the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines rolled into one with 13 rebounds, five blocked shots and two assists.

Although Eric Fender, Springfield’s first-year coach, didn’t blame Gysin for all the damage, the coach’s strategy to combat the East Palestine strongman with more than one player spoke for itself.

“We used Tim Norris, Ben Avnet and Tanner Avnet and we tried to go a little zone, but that’s why Ben Gysin is a first-team all-conference player,” Fender said.

It didn’t help that East Palestine was 12 of 19 at the foul line, while Springfield was 1 of 5, but Fender still didn’t directly attribute the loss to fouls.

“That might have hurt us, but we didn’t play well in the first half and that’s what hurt us,” he said.

Jim Zubick had 19 points for Springfield (8-9, 7-6), either from various distances or by sprinting to the basket when the opportunity arose.

“We try to tell our kids [when the opponent is sitting in the zone] to attack the gap,” Fender said of giving his 5-7 senior guard the green light to dribble.

“He can’t help that he’s 5-7, 5-8, but he does what we ask him to do.”

Fender was asked about losing to the Bulldogs a second time.

“Before the game, we told the kids that they [East Palestine] had everything to lose and we had nothing to lose. We play two more games this week, but this was first on our schedule and we wanted to get this one as much as we could.”