Pembroke completes perfect season with win over Souhegan in D2 boys basketball final

DURHAM – Matt Alosa was waiting for the right time to turn on the press.

When his No. 1 Pembroke Academy boys basketball team had done so in the first half of Saturday’s Division II championship game, No. 7 Souhegan picked it apart.

That led to a seven-point halftime lead for the Sabers, but early in the fourth quarter, five straight points by Patrick Welch put Pembroke on top. And that’s when Alosa called for the pressure.

It worked, leading the Spartans on a 14-1 run in the fourth quarter and a 49-41 victory at the University of New Hampshire. The title win is the first for Pembroke since 1991, Alosa’s senior year as a Spartan, and completes a perfect season at 22-0.

“Someone wins the championship every year, but to have a perfect season is very difficult,” Alosa said. “At some point, you have a hiccup. (Saturday) was a hiccup in the road.

“The reason this team is great is because they can withstand that stuff and still win. (Winning a title) validates what you do and the work and the effort.”

After sitting out the entire second quarter with three fouls, Welch scored 11 of his 14 points in the second half and Rene Maher led all scorers with 17 points. Pembroke scored just two points in the second quarter, but was able to pick up the tempo to get 35 in the final two quarters.

“They started bringing the tempo and we lost control of the game,” Souhegan senior Brandon Len said. “It was more of a tempo issue. The whole game, we were kind of playing our basketball, but when the tempo picked up, we started playing their basketball and we never really composed ourselves.”

Len led the Sabers (14-8) with 16 points and Jake Kennedy added 12 points, but after taking a 35-31 lead early in the fourth quarter, the Sabers scored just one point over the next six-plus minutes.

Souhegan led 36-33 with 6:56 left, but Welch hit a 3-pointer to tie the game and added an acrobatic layup to give Pembroke a lead it would not relinquish.

“There is a reason why (Welch) is a first-team all-state player,” Souhegan coach Mike Heaney said. “But who we talked about at the end of the game was Maher. He’s not known as a shooter. Great player, but necessarily a shooter and he made some big shots.

“The timeouts were pretty simple. We’ve got limit them to one shot, we’ve got to close out on shooters, you’ve got to win the 50-50 ball, you’ve got to get to the rim strong. They made the plays they had to have. They’re undefeated for a reason.”

Pembroke had a 12-9 lead at the end of the first quarter, but with time running out, Welch was called for an offensive foul, his third of the game. The junior came out and didn’t return until the second half.

“One of the strategies against him, he does use the push-off a lot,” Len said. “When he gets into you, you really have to take it right to the chest and try to take the charge. That was something we had to focus on.”

With Welch on the bench, Souhegan went on a 12-0 run to open the second quarter and led 21-14 at halftime.

“Up seven at the half against the No. 1 team, I was thrilled,” Heaney said. “It was the best half I thought we could have had. I couldn’t have been happier coming into halftime. A seven-point lead (in the final) feels like 30 in the regular season. I was really excited.”

While Alosa knew what his team needed to do in the second half, he felt like karma was on Souhegan’s side.

“We talked about being calm and just executing our stuff, and we’ll get back into the game,” he said. “I had no doubt we were going to get back in the game.

“Everybody morns for Tony (Barksdale) and (Souhegan) is Cinderella. That could beat you six-on-five. It felt like that in the first half and we withstood everything.”

Barksdale, a former Souhegan basketball player who graduated in 2012, died on March 2, before the start of the playoffs. During the postseason, the Sabers wore warmup shirts with his name and number on the back – Len even changed his number to Barksdale’s No. 42 – and the team had been playing to honor his memory.

When Len hit a buzzer-beating 3-pointer to end the third quarter, and put the Sabers up 33-31, Souhegan felt like it was eight minutes away from victory.

“I was sitting at the table, and (the 3-pointer) was right on line, and I knew that it was going in,” Kennedy said. “I thought of Tony and how he’s looking down on us when (Len) hit that shot.”

But in the fourth quarter, Pembroke cranked up its pressure and when the Spartans started scoring, the Sabers struggled against it.

“I was waiting for the right time, because if you do it at the wrong time, it’s two Souhegan layups,” Alosa said. “Basketball is about momentum. When we had the momentum and we tied it up and our side of the gym started erupting, we called an aggressive halfcourt press. We captured the momentum, had a 14-1 run and game over.”