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Bello, Indians beat Blue Devils at their own game
Bello, Indians
beat Blue Devils
at their own game
By Steve WILAJ
girard
Midway through a back-and-forth, fast-paced first quarter in Girard’s season opener against McDonald, Indians coach Craig Hannon chatted with Christian Bello as he exited the game for a quick rest.
“Our pace is fine. It’s good,” he assuredly told Bello.
Hannon was right.
Girard beat the Blue Devils at their own game Friday night, running and gunning its way to a 68-48 victory for the Indians’ first win against McDonald in three seasons. Bello led the way with 18 points, Tyler Kilbourne added 14 and Dylan O’Hara scored 12.
“We have five senior starters, so we felt this was our best possible chance of going against [McDonald’s] press,” Hannon said. “It gets you to play fast, but we just stayed composed the whole night, found open guys and attacked the rim.”
The Blue Devils (0-1) stuck around early, trailing just 16-13 after the first quarter thanks to an Anthony Pugh buzzer-beating 3-pointer. But Girard (1-0) separated itself in the second quarter, outscoring McDonald 18-8 while forcing seven turnovers to take a 13-point halftime lead.
“We wanted to go out and start off strong,” Bello said. “We knew we had to rebound and not turn the ball over.”
Girard accomplished both of those things, outrebounding the Blue Devils 37-26 — paced by Kilbourn’s 11 boards — while committing just nine turnovers.
“It’s great to start off the season with a win against McDonald,” Bello said. “Once we got ahead, we didn’t look back. It got a little shaky in the third quarter, but we handled ourselves and held them off.”
The Blue Devils opened the third on a 6-0 run to cut the deficit to seven, but that’s as close as they got. McDonald — which was led by Brad Woodley’s 15 and Pugh’s 14 points — shot 38 percent and committed 19 turnovers.
Blue Devils coach Jeff Rasile said he was disappointed in two aspects: turnovers and intensity.
“We’re a relatively young team and knew tonight was going to be a difficult challenge for us,” he said. “But the way we played was disappointing and that’s on the coaching staff. Plus the kids need to play a little harder.
“We need to play old-school, tough McDonald basketball, but we didn’t do that tonight. They beat us in every phase…Some of the turnovers in the first half were the strangest turnovers I’ve seen in 15 years and that was from some of our team leaders. So we can learn some lessons and the kids need to start buying into the system.”
Girard shot 43 percent and also received solid performances from Chaston Williams, with eight points, and DeOnte Brown, with nine points and five rebounds.
“We need to be balanced like tonight,” Hannon said. “We wanted to be 1-0, we did that, and now we look ahead to Brookfield [on Tuesday]. We’re just gonna take it one at a time and see where it goes.”