BOB ETTINGER
AUSTINBURG TOWNSHIP — Grand River Academy’s Josh Hartz, like any basketball coach, wants the Eagles to give him their best. To that end, he called a players-only meeting and asked his players to find a way to give him what he’s asking for.
The meeting paid off and Hartz got exactly what he was asking for in the form of a 68-24 victory over SS. John and Paul on Friday night at GRA.
“After the last couple of games, we talked about individual basketball,” Hartz said. “(Playing individual basketball) is the key reason we haven’t been able to pull out the close ones.
“I had the senior captains hold a meeting. All the players listed all their grievances. I had an assistant coach there to mediate, so I had nothing to do with it. It obviously worked. They got al their grievances out. They all worked as one unit the whole night. Even the bench players.”
The Eagles (7-6) jumped to a 9-0 lead in the opening two minutes.
“They wanted it more than we did,” SJP coach Tom Penna said. “They came after us with pressure all over the floor. The first four minutes were the most important (and the Heralds trailed, 11-2, during that time). We turned the ball over way too many times.
“We made the comment before the game, they warmed up harder than us.”
That early advantage was just what the Eagles wanted.
“We definitely wanted to intimidate them,” GRA guard Brant O’Brien said. “We got their confidence down. That’s what we wanted to do in the first quarter. We wanted to let them know this was our house and they weren’t going to come in here and win a game.
“We did a great job tonight.”
That opening flurry had the Heralds (1-12) wondering what hit them.
“That’s when the youth kicks in,” Penna said. “We’d try and run a play, they’d steal the ball and go in for a layup. We come down and try run another play, and they’d go down and get a layup.
“Right off the bat, we were down, 7-0, and our players were like, ‘Oh, my God!’ You could see it in their faces. They’re young and haven’t played enough and they got shellshocked.”
Brady Prewitt led the Eagles with 20 points and four assists and O’Brien netted 19 points and three steals. Jackson Berry scored eight points. All 11 GRA players who entered the game scored at least two points.
“It was nothing I said or did,” Hartz said. “That’s them making up their minds at this juncture of the season to set aside their differences and come together. The team wants to take each quarter, each game, and work as a full unit.
“When they do that, they make my job easy. That’s the players buying into the team concept.”
After scoring 40 points in the first half, the Eagles slowed the pace a little and tallied just 28 in the final two quarters.
“In the second half, we tried to work on our offense,” Hartz said. “We spread the floor and and looked for open shots. That’s the way the game is supposed to be played instead of one-of-one.”
“That’s a hell of a job for (Hartz) the way he did that,” Penna said with gratitude. “That’s two times in a row they had the chance to really blow us out and he held the kids back. That’s a lot of class by those guys.”
Ralph Pugliese scored nine points for the Heralds, Alex Iarocci tallied eight and Ben Thomas added five.
