FITCHBURG — Without the ability to practice daily, Mahar boys summer basketball coach Enver Softic firmly believes a team is only as good as its last game. So when his team showed up unprepared on Tuesday despite winning, Soft felt his team had already lost Thursday’s matchup against Monty Tech before it even started.
“We lost this game Tuesday,” said Softic following his team’s 42-34 loss. “We weren’t prepared on Tuesday and they came out and mentally they weren’t ready enough to beat a team that played OK. Monty Tech is OK but the fact is we didn’t beat a good team all summer.”
Monty Tech entered the game with a 4-5 record, while Mahar went into Thursday with a 6-3 record. Now 6-4, Mahar has lost to each of the top three teams (Leominster, Pioneer and St. Bernard’s) along with Monty Tech.
“If you come out Tuesday and make a statement Tuesday, you get into a nice flow,” said Softic. “Then tonight’s game doesn’t (end in a loss) because you’re rebounding off the way you played on Tuesday. Since we have no practices and since the last thing they did was play on Tuesday, Tuesday is who we were going to be tonight and we were.”
Tuesday’s game against the now 3-6 Notre Dame team came down to the wire for Mahar, needing to make a comeback in the final four minutes to win.
With the loss on Thursday, Mahar Falls to 6-4. The team will face North Middlesex in its final game of the summer season before playoffs. North Middlesex currently sits in fourth and final playoff seed. North Middlesex was still playing at the completion of Mahar’s game, but whether Mahar makes the playoffs will come down to the final game of the season between the two teams.
“We haven’t beaten the teams that are going to make the playoffs, so who are we going to beat,” said Softic. “They have had a good summer, they’ve done some good things, but they weren’t mature enough at this point in time to make a charge coming down the stretch and play the type of games they should have. This doesn’t mean anything for the winter. It does mean they have a lot of work to do.”
Mahar never built a lead of more than three points throughout the game. It led 30-28 with six minutes left, but that quickly changed when Monty Tech went on an 11-0 run to go up 39-30 at the 2:54 mark and never trailed for the rest of the game.
“I think at the end we might have been pressing a little bit, but really it was just that we didn’t play well enough to win,” said Softic. “We could have played until 10 p.m. tonight and at the end of the game we still would have lost. There was no sense of urgency.”
Deven Patch led Mahar with six points to go along with nine rebounds. Jakob Carron added five points with nine rebounds.
Mahar led 21-19 at halftime. Jordan Desrosiers hit a three with nine seconds left in the half to put his team up by two and for the six lead change of the first half.
Mahar went down 7-0 to start the game but later crawled back into the game with a 9-0 run midway through the half, going up 16-13.
Mahar will play at 6 p.m. on Tuesday against North Middlesex.