Northstars too much for Black Knights

Cicero-North Syracuse opened Tuesday night’s nonleague boys basketball game at Rome Free Academy on a 17-0 run and never looked back, defeating the Black Knights 89-64.

Robert Siechen began the contest by banking a three-pointer and Michael Gallo hit another on the next possession for the Northstars for a quick 6-0 lead. Luke Paragon converted a threepoint play the old fashioned way to make it 9-0 lead with 6:22 to go in the first quarter then Reece Congel scored eight straight points for the visitors to complete the 17-0 run. Congel scored 12 of his 21 points in the opening quarter.

Rome didn’t score its first points until the 4:37 mark when Jalynn Brownlee made a pair of free throws, to make it 17-2. RFA’s first field goal came from Kaiden McCaskill with 3:31 to go in the opening quarter. He had a chance for a three-point play, but missed the free throw and the score was 20-4 at that point in favor of C-NS.

C-NS pushed the lead to 31-6 by the end of the first quarter.

“They’re a good team,” RFA head coach Nick Medicis said. “They’re a veteran team that’s played together for a while. Tonight was another game where we came out and made inexperienced mistakes. We looked a little intimidated. They knocked down some shots, they banked in a three, made some tough shots and we couldn’t put the ball in the basket. We dug ourselves a hole and then we played about even the rest of the way.”

In the second quarter, McCaskill scored the opening points, two of his team-high 17 for RFA, but C-NS answered every bucket that the Black Knights scored with one of their own. Paragon led the charge for C-NS, scoring 10 of his gamehigh 34 points in the second quarter, pushing the led for the Northstars to 50-24 at halftime.

In the third quarter, Paragon did more damage to RFA, scoring 19 points. McCaskill scored seven for Rome in the third, and Surafia Norris scored five of his 11 points for the Black Knights in the third. By the end of the third, C-NS held a 77-49 lead.

“We just have to continue to get better,” Medicis said. “It’s still game two. It’s the second game in a row where we’ve played well for a couple of quarters and then we have one bad stretch or one bad quarter where we get ourself in such a hole and then we play even the rest of the way. We have to have a short memory. We have a day to practice and prepare and we’re on the road for the next couple.”

“We have a pretty smart team,” C-NS coach Kyle Martin said. “They pass the ball very well. We know what RFA is all about. They’re a great pressing team, they play really hard, so a key was that if we took care of the ball and break the press, we thought that we’d have success. We did a good job of long passes and getting over the top and getting layups.”

RFA, which dropped to 0-2, is back on the floor on Thursday night when it visits Whitesboro at 7.

The Northstars improved to 2-0.