Boys' Basketball: Greenville pushes aside Pine Tree in D South quarterfinal

AUGUSTA — If Monday morning’s game was a bad one for Greenville, then the rest of the Class D South semifinalists might want to look out.

The top-seeded Lakers pounded the ball inside and pounded Pine Tree Academy 63-37 in a quarterfinal contest at Augusta Civic Center.

“That was not our best effort,” Greenville coach Bill Foley said. “But we’ll chalk it off to long layoff, I guess.”

The Lakers (18-1) hadn’t played in nearly two weeks, and had to wake up early for the 10 a.m. tip. But thankfully for them, Devin Boone was an early-riser, and he was rising up over smaller Breakers players all game long.

“Boone was definitely the x-factor,” Pine Tree coach Trevor Schlisner said. “We wanted to take (Nick) Foley away, the point guard who I think is probably the best basketball player in Class D. We did a good job containing him, but (Boone) early on he killed us.”

Boone, a 6-foot-3 junior center, scored Greenville’s first eight points, including a pair of three-point plays.

“Huge,” Foley called Boone. “We’ve had that, not every game we’ve played, but that’s been a big part of our game, is to go inside. It worked today.”

Foley scored the next eight points for the Lakers, who led 16-8 after one quarter.

Boone made a tough layup on the first possession of the second quarter, and scored the first six points to stretch the lead to 22-8.

“After a few times, I was able to get in, and they were looking for me down low,” Boone said.

Evan Bjork made a layup for Greenville to account for the first Laker points not scored by Boone or Foley. His first two points also extended the Greenville scoring run to 8-0 before a Najee Jean-Louis layup stopped it for the ninth-seeded Breakers (8-12).

“Energy wasn’t really there today, like it normally is,” Schlisner said. “I don’t want to attribute it to nerves either, because they weren’t really nervous coming out. We really had nothing to lose.”

The Laker lead was 27-14 at half, then stretched to 40-24 after three quarters, but it stagnated in the fourth.

“At 17-1, sometimes it’s hard to motivate,” Foley said. “They certainly gave us a lot to work on today. My hat’s off to Pine Tree. They hustled, they were a lot more athletic than we thought they were, and we actually got pushed around a little bit underneath.

“We talked about all the upsets that happened Saturday. You got to show up every night, every game. You can’t mail it in, so to speak.”

The Breakers tried their best to make it a game, but they struggled to get the ball to go through the hoop. They also struggled to stop Boone for most of the night.

“Proud of my guys, tried our hardest. We weren’t really hitting any shots … that’s the issue. And we didn’t move the ball really well,” Schlisner said. “We battled though, played hard. I think we might have surprised them a little bit. But nothing was dropping for us though.”

Jean-Louis and Jared Tamaleaa led the way for the Breakers, with 11 points apiece. But Pine Tree made just 14 field goals as a team.

Boone himself made 13, and finished with a game-high 31 points. Foley got going in the fourth, hitting four of his six 3s, to get his 25 points.