The depth of quality teams within the Eastern Maine Class C boys basketball tournament field can’t be understated with tournament time a little more than two weeks away.
Perennial contender Calais and defending state champion Houlton hover at the top of the standings, while Central of Corinth, Piscataquis of Guilford and Washington Academy of East Machias are among other teams battling for the five available preliminary-round byes in the division.
Two other contenders, Orono and Lee Academy, are getting stronger as postseason approaches after the return of key players — Nate DeSisto of Orono and Lewis Wang of Lee — from injuries that sidelined them for much of the regular season.
But the hottest team of all in Eastern C is third-ranked George Stevens Academy of Blue Hill, the winner of 11 consecutive games since an 0-3 start.
In those three early losses, the Eagles yielded an average of 69.1 points per game. Since then, coach Dwayne Carter’s club has been much stingier, allowing opponents just 46 points per contest.
“We started out kind of rough, trying to figure out what we wanted to do,” Carter said. “But I think that kind of drove the kids to be really focused, because it’s a really focused bunch and they have high expectations.”
One solution to the Eagle’s slow start was to pull back defensively from fullcourt pressure to an emphasis on the program’s traditional halfcourt man-to-man approach.
“We’ve really focused on playing good halfcourt defense and we’ve gotten a lot better at it,” Carter said. “We obviously can improve like anyone else, but our focus has been to play really good halfcourt defense and it’s turned out that we’re getting more turnovers now than when we extended the defense to fullcourt.”
The Eagles’ current streak includes victories over all three teams that defeated them at the start of the season — Orono, Piscataquis and Washington Academy — and all three of those wins were by double digits. After yielding a combined 209 points in the losses to those teams early in the season, the Eagles allowed just 128 points combined while defeating those same foes in rematches.
“The team defense has really improved,” Carter said, “and the big guys have really picked up on help defense and that’s made a huge difference.”
The Eagles, who went 9-9 a season ago and won an Eastern C prelim before bowing out in the regional quarterfinals, have already secured their first winning regular season since 2011 with a blend of experience and youth and a second blend of height and quickness.
The backcourt pairing of senior Kelsey Allen — a third-year starter at point guard — and freshman Taylor Schildroth are the Eagle’s leading scorers so far this winter, along with sophomore forward and defensive stopper Jarrod Chase.
They are joined by a trio of 6-foot-4-inch frontcourt players with complementary strengths, according to Carter, in senior Finn Davis-Batt, junior Nick Szewz and freshman Max Mattson.
“We’re pretty balanced,” Carter said, “and it’s been good because we have some experience and we have some younger kids with a lot of skill and who have played a lot of basketball so it’s been a good mix.”
The Eagles already have matched the program’s most wins in a season since 2006, when the Eagles went 14-4 and advanced to the Eastern C championship game. But they face a fairly rigorous schedule to close out the regular season with four games in seven nights — and three of those contests on the road.
First, the Eagles visit Class B Mount Desert Island of Bar Harbor on Thursday, then play at Searsport on Friday and at Bucksport next Monday before hosting their Senior Night game against Central on Wednesday, Feb. 4.
“We’d like to be in the top five, we just have to win games to do that,” Carter said.
