ALTON – Things haven’t come easy for the Marquette Catholic High School boys basketball team.
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Averaging just 47.5 points per game of offense, the Explorers have had to lean heavily on their defense to gut out a 6-3 record.
That defense was there on Tuesday night as Marquette hosted Gateway Metro Conference rivals Father McGivney, winning a low-scoring affair 47-32.
“We’ve done a pretty good job so far playing defense, we’ve just got to keep getting better,” Marquette head coach Steve Medford said after Tuesday’s conference win.
“I think all my teams I’ve had in the past have always been really good defensively, just offensively, we become anemic, hopefully we can figure that out.”
McGivney falls to 7-3 overall and 1-2 in the conference. Meanwhile, the Explorers are off to a dream 3-0 start in the GMC.
“We want to win the conference,” Medford said. “We want to keep playing good basketball and keep preparing for every team. That’s what we’ve done. I think, as a staff, we’ve come in and put a scout together, we have a walk-through before every game, we spend about an hour and a half before each game with a practice, and that’s just what we do. We’re just getting better and better.”
Marquette’s defense has held its opponents to an average of 40.7 points per game.
“Their defense is outstanding,” McGivney head coach Corey Clouser said of Marquette. “They have huge bodies, they switch everything, they’re kind of interchangeable with their size and their strength. That’s their advantage. Right now, they’re bigger and stronger than us.”
But he still felt his team played well enough defense to win the game; it was just an off shooting night.
“I think we scrapped like crazy,” Clouser said. “Defensively, for the game, we held a really good team to 47, that’s with fouling at the end. Our offense has to be more crisp in the half-court. We have to find a way to create more turnovers, more havoc. We have to do more to put the ball in the hole.”
Cameron Jones put the game’s first points on the board, but a couple of free throws from Carson Barone and a three-pointer from Chase Jansen gave McGivney a 5-2 lead.
Cameron Golike’s basket and one foul shot from Jack Rea tied the game up at five, and that’s how it stayed after the first quarter.
Chase Jones went one-for-two from the line to open the second, giving Marquette the lead, a lead it never lost.
The Explorers grew their lead to as many as seven points, but a buzzer-beater three from Jansen brought it back a little to 20-16 Marquette at the half.
Marquette outscored McGivney 11-5 in the third to increase the lead to 31-21.
Barone scored quickly into the fourth to make it an eight-point game, but any hopes of a comeback were crushed by back-to-back threes from Chase Jones, pushing the envelope to 37-23, forcing McGivney into a timeout with 6:03 left in the game.
“He’s been known to do that; he’s a really good basketball player,” Medford said of Chase Jones. “We expect a lot of him.”
“Those are probably the daggers,” Clouser said. “That was probably the momentum. We had a bucket right out of the third-quarter talk, then they hit two threes, and that was probably the end.”
Marquette outscored the Griffins 10-9 the rest of the way for the win.
Chase Jones led all scorers with 16 points. Carson Jones added eight, Golike had seven, and Rea and Nolan Robinson each scored six. Cameron Jones netted four points.
Jansen led the Griffins with 14 points, and Barone had 10.
Marquette has never lost to McGivney, improving to 11-0 against the Griffins all-time. This season’s conference rematch will be on Friday, February 6, in Glen Carbon.
