Storybook season ended with a title for Souhegan boys basketball

With all the uncertainty that surrounded the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Peter Pierce made the tough decision to sit out the Souhegan High School boys basketball season before it was close to getting started.

"No body was making decisions, no body had any idea what was going to happen," Pierce said. "I just said to the AD (Kelli Braley), I can’t get answers, no body is making decisions, which is fine, but I’m out until next year. She said it’s you program,"

The Sabers played just a handful of games a year ago, and when Pierce returned in the summer of 2021 to start working with the kids who were coming back, there were quite a few new faces.

"I worked with some of the kids during the summer," he said. "Some of these kids I didn’t even know, I hadn’t met them before the first day of the season, so that’s pretty remarkable, too."

While Souhegan had talent on its roster going into the season, it lacked experience, and expectations were a tricky thing to pin down. And then the Sabers started playing.

Down 22 points in the second half at Kingswood on opening night, the Sabers showed what their potential might be, coming back for a 64-61 win. That was the first of 20 victories on the season, which ended Sunday with Souhegan holding the Division II championship plaque following a 53-51 overtime win against ConVal.

"Doubters are always going to be there, you just have to use it as motivation," Souhegan sophomore Nolan Colby said. "We had full confidence. We knew ever since the summer that we had talent. We had to come together as a team and figure out that we could win. Now we’re here."

The title is the first for Souhegan since 2004 and the game was the program's first appearance in a championship game since 2013. Pierce took over as the head coach the following year, and while the Sabers have had good years during that time, they'd never made it out of the quarterfinal round.

To do it in a year with so many question marks surrounding the team at the start was unexpected.

"What a fairy tale for season for this team," Pierce said. "For those kids, who didn’t play last year for the most part, for them to come together and play in a final and a semifinal and a quarterfinal, to post a 20-1 record, it’s unbelievable."

Opposing teams knew about John McBride going into the year, and while his game-high 15 rebounds in the final were big for the Sabers, junior Matt Canavan shined in the postseason. After scoring 27 points in the quarterfinals against Laconia, he had a game-high 19 to beat the Cougars.

"Matt turned it on," Pierce said. "He didn’t play much last year and he’s going to get better and better and better. Offensively, he gives us a spark when we need it. Some of the stuff he finished was unbelievable."

Souhegan won its first dozen games of the regular season, but only two of those games - the season-opener against Kingswood and a three-point win over ConVal - were decided by single digits. Heading into the final week of January, the Sabers were poised for a tough stretch, hosting Lebanon, going to Pelham and then playing Pembroke in the span of five days.

The hiccup came in the first game, as the Raiders left Amherst with a 60-44 victory.

"That was a wakeup call for us," McBride said. "It showed us the level of basketball we had to play to win playoff basketball. Once we figured that out, we’ve been playing at a high level ever since, we responded and we’re the last team left."

The Sabers avenged that loss with a 41-32 win over Lebanon in the semifinals and then got a fitting matchup in the championship game against ConVal.

After spending a few years as an assistant and junior varsity coach at Souhegan, Pierce left to be the head coach for the Cougars for two seasons before his return to the sideline for the Sabers.

"It’s full circle," Pierce said. "The two years I spent at ConVal, I loved. The program was in rough shape when I got there and I’m not going to lay claim to anything they’ve done recently. They were meaningful years for me and I think they were meaningful years for the program as well."