Sports

In the interest of full disclosure, Hopkinton boys basketball coach Dave ChaseJake Nichols glides to the rim. wasn’t necessarily heartbroken when the Hawks scheduled season opener with Mascoma was postponed the Friday before Christmas.
Though his team was no doubt anxious to get the show on the road, the Royals posed something of a significant threat on the first night of the campaign. Meanwhile, the delay bought the inexperienced Hawks some time to iron out any remaining pre-season wrinkles in a less demanding environment, an opportunity they took advantage of by routing Inter-Lakes, 62-41, and pushing a highly-touted Franklin squad to the brink in a 46-41 loss during their own Hawk Holiday Classic on Saturday and Sunday.

Admittedly, John Stark girls basketball coach Wayne Thomson is beginning to sound something like a broken record.Brittany Purington defends against Bow.
As long as results like Saturday’s less-than-inspiring 43-26 loss to Bow in the Coe-Brown Holiday Tournament keep rolling in, though, the message will remain the same.
“In the second half they just lost their focus,” Thomson said after a two-point halftime deficit quickly ballooned to double-figures in the third period. “Focus – I feel like I’ve said that word 100 times in practice. They’re just not focused on what they need to do … I just want them to make better decisions. Physically they have the talent, but they are just not making smart decisions at the proper times in the game. That comes from experience, and it’s not happening right now.”
Granted, experience has been difficult to come by this winter. John Stark had two of its first five games of the year postponed due to weather and also lost nearly a full week of practice following the crippling ice storm that blanketed the region.

Any question as to whether expectations have changed within the Hillsboro-Deering boys basketball locker room were answered about 32 minutes after the season began Monday night.
And it wasn’t the 61-40 thrashing of Newport that told the story, though it was a thorough and convincing beating that featured four quarters of intense defense and 20 points from junior Tucker Cutter, 16 of which came before halftime.
Instead it was the response from the Hillcats, who lost to the same Newport outfit once last winter and barely upended the Tigers in the second go-round for their only win of the season. By that comparison, a 21-point win less than a year later would seem a sign of overachievement.
But to the Hillcats, it was all in a day’s work.
“That’s what should happen right there,” McCandless said. “We have a roster that goes 10-plus deep, and guys are running and flying around and playing the defense we’re capable of playing. This should be just the beginning. We’ll see as we face some of the tougher teams, but this was just a great way to start.”

Thanks to a blitz of bad weather and widespread power outages in Henniker and Weare,Greg Jones the John Stark wrestling team had already endured three snow days and a lone practice in the week leading to Saturday’s holiday tournament at Bow. So when the Generals were forced to leave four weight classes empty due to injury and other circumstances and when the remaining wrestlers drew difficult brackets, coach Bill Walton could only thank Murphy’s Law.
“We had four weight classes not accounted for, and my better wrestlers got rough seeds so they didn’t get any easy first-round matches,” Walton said. “After last week with three snow days and one practice, it was sort of like, ‘This is just the way it’s going to go.’”
Indeed the day didn’t go as well as the Generals would have liked, with just two competitors making it as far as the consolation semifinals, but for a young team with little match experience under its belt the tournament atmosphere was a significant learning tool.

Another early-winter attack from Mother Nature, this one a crippling one-two punch of devastating ice followed by non-stop snow, made something of a mess out of the winter sports schedules for local high schools last week, creating cancellations and postponements and forcing some teams into the holiday break without so much as a single game under their belts.
Despite it all, though, Mother Nature gets only a cursory assist from this reporter.
Honestly, most of the schedules were a mess already.
In an effort to save schools money – at least that’s what I’ve been told – the NHIAA altered its scheduling process this year, abandoning the two-year alternating schedule in favor of one designed to save as many schools as possible on traveling expenses.
What the machine churned out, though, is a complicated mess for most of those in The Villager coverage area. This docket has all but eliminated good, local competition and has instead forced a handful of teams to hit the road more than ever. It should make for a truly bizarre winter, and that’s got nothing to do with prolonged power outages or mountainous snow banks.

Thanks to a pair of critical wins from second-year wrestlers, a young John Stark team picked up a 39-33 win in its season opener with Newport last week in a match that may have painted the perfect picture of a scrappy and resourceful Generals squad.
A roster short on experience and lacking in depth upended the Tigers thanks to key wins from David Wilson at 215 and Ben O’Donal at 285 as well as superlative efforts from Paul Jamilkowski and Greg Jones, both of whom jumped a weight class to fill the card and came away with victories.
“The big thing this year is we are so young in a lot of the lower and middle weights that we really relied on some of the upper weight guys to come through,” Stark coach Bill Walton said, noting the efforts from Wilson and O’Donal, both of whom pinned their opposition. “They are the ones that stepped up and pretty much sealed it for us. If we lose either of those matches we’re pretty much done.”

It was about this same time last season that the Hopkinton girls basketball team began gift-wrapping victories under the opposition’s tree, struggling to hold early leads and cracking under late-game pressure while suffering through early-season growing pains.
The holidays may once again be right around the corner, but Tuesday’s 40-34 win over Newport proved the Hawks are in a decidedly less giving mood this winter.
A more experienced and savvy Hopkinton team provided the first visual evidence that this season will be different, racing to a 16-1 lead and, more importantly, holding off a furious Tiger rally down the stretch by pulling the ball out and forcing Newport to chase.
The Hawks earned their first win of the year, improving to 1-1.
“They came back, but they never really had us on the ropes. The girls hung in there, and that’s their maturity starting to show,” Hopkinton coach Dave Hughes said. “Last year we give that game away. But this year we pull it out because when we’re in the lead we make them come at us.”

Hillsboro-Deering boys basketball coach Kurt McCandless hears the whispers.Miles Galloway
Every year since he arrived on the Hillcat bench, McCandless has been forced to listen to the list of reasons his team won’t succeed. He was told prior to last winter that a squad comprised primarily of inexperienced sophomores had no chance to compete on the Class M stage, a forecast that ultimately proved prophetic in a frustrating one-win season.
And on the dawn of the new campaign the talk is that the Hillcats, though improved and more seasoned, will again struggle for respectability in a deep and talented division.
The chatter can be difficult to ignore. Which is why McCandless has the Hillcats on a quest to shut everybody up.

Gone are five seniors – including four starters – and two players who received All-State recognition from a team that reached the Class M quarterfinals a season ago. That group takes with it roughly 70 percent of the scoring and 70 percent of the rebounding from a 12-win squad that was good enough to earn the No. 7 seed in the postseason last March.
It would be easy, then, for the suddenly inexperienced Hopkinton boys basketball team to lower expectations this winter.
Those who remain in the huddle, though, aren’t picking through a list of excuses just yet.
The Hawks return a trio poised to take the leadership mantle this year, and Jake Nichols – the lone returning starter, on the verge of a potential breakout season – and teammates Steve Bower and Will Hatch spent the summer working together with one focus in mind: Continuing what has become something of a Hopkinton tradition.

Heather Murdough maneuvers around Melissa Baron.The mood in the Hillsboro-Deering locker room after a jittery and often sloppy first half against archrival Hopkinton in Tuesday’ season opener wasn’t rooted in aggravation so much as assurance.
“I think it was just our mindset,” H-D senior tri-captain Libby Dutton said. “We had the first-quarter jitters, first game of the year, and we were like, ‘Alright, we’ve got that over with. Now let’s go play.’”
Simple enough.
The trick is making it look that easy, and the Hillcats proved to be up to that task, quickly putting both the sluggish start and the Hawks behind them with a furious run early in the third that paved the way to a 48-38 victory.
Hopkinton evened the score with the first hoop of the third quarter before the Hillcats ran off spurts of 9-0 and 10-0 with only a lone Hawk score sandwiched between, turning a competitive contest into a laugher with a 19-4 third period.