After Batavia cut the Geneva lead to four in the third quarter Friday, Geneva coach Phil Ralston called a timeout.
“Remember what we said you had to do to come in here?” Ralston said. “You had to play aggressive. We couldn’t worry about what the officials were going to call. We could only worry about what we could do.”
The Vikings took that message to heart, and remained unbeaten this season in their Upstate Eight River opener. A 13-3 spurt from that point on helped Geneva pull away and secure a 58-40 win.
“It tightened up a little bit on us,” Ralston said. “The thing of it is that we let the environment and the pressure they gave us rattle us a little bit. We almost forgot how to pass and catch and play.”
Having a player like Buffalo-bound senior Nate Navigato doesn’t hurt. He scored eight points in the decisive run, and Mike Landi, playing his first game of the season after recovering from a concussion suffered during football season, scored the other five points.
The lead was stretched to 48-34 with 4:12 left in the fourth quarter as a result of that run.
“Navigato is a nice player,” Batavia coach Jim Nazos said. “He made some shots. I don’t think we helped on him the way we did earlier in the game in the fourth quarter. We weren’t able to get over and get the help to him. He’s going to Buffalo for free for a reason. It’s got to be a team effort on him. Fourth quarter, we lost a little bit of that.”
Read the rest of Paul Johnson’s story here.
