Broncos go cold in semifinal loss to Trinity

DURHAM – For all that went wrong for the Alvirne High School boys basketball team in the first half of Tuesday’s Division I semifinal, the Broncos were in the game heading into the fourth quarter.

Alvirne came out in a man-to-man defense in the third quarter, forcing Trinity to put the air back in the ball. The Broncos held the Pioneers to just four points while turning a 17-point halftime deficit into six.

But Trinity opened the fourth quarter with an 11-1 run and Alvirne couldn’t get its shots to go down. As a result, the No. 11 Broncos saw their Cinderella run come to an end in a 51-36 loss to No. 2 Trinity at the University of New Hampshire.

Caleb Donnelly led Alvirne (11-10) with 14 points, but no one else had more than six as the Broncos shot less than 24 percent from the field, including 1-for-21 from behind the 3-point line. The one make didn’t come until there were 20 seconds left in the game.

“We missed a lot of shots,” Alvirne coach Seth Garon said. “We got some decent looks, but I think our nerves just got to us, and I’ll take fault for that for not preparing our guys for what to expect here. We couldn’t grab loose balls. We weren’t putting in layups.”

The Broncos missed their first five shots from the field and didn’t get their first field goal until an Antonio Beaulieu jumper with 4:02 left in the first quarter. That made it an 11-3 game, and Alvirne cut the lead down to 11-7, but the dry spell returned.

Trinity (18-3) closed out the final 11 minutes of the first half on a 16-3 run that saw Alvirne go scoreless for the final 5:18 of the second quarter. Content to run out the clock, the Pioneers held the ball for the final two minutes of the quarter against the Broncos’ zone defense.

“We weren’t moving quickly on our feet in the zone, as we had been in our past two games,” Garon said. “We went straight-up man. We had to matchup and it ended up being a little more of style we like, the back-and-forth.”

That kept Trinity off the scoreboard for the first five minutes of the third quarter, but Alvirne was only able to cut the lead down to 10 points during that stretch.

But in the final 37 seconds of the quarter, the Broncos scored six points, including a basket by Jonathan Baldwin where he bounced an inbounds pass off the back of a Trinity player and went in for a layup with two seconds left to make it a 31-25 game.

“We missed shots and a team like that, you can’t go down 17,” Garon said. “I told my guys, you’ve got two options. You can either pack it in or come out and make it a game. I couldn’t be more proud of how they responded in the third quarter. They took it to them.”

Trinity’s Carmen Giampetruzzi opened the fourth quarter by making two jump shots to start the 11-1 run. Giampetruzzi had six points over that stretch and Silvere Aluko had the other five to give the Pioneers control of the game.

Aluko finished with a game-high 16 points off the bench and Zack Stevens had 14 points for Trinity, which will now face No. 1 Bishop Guertin in the Division I final Saturday at 4 p.m. at UNH.