By DAVE O’SULLIVAN
Staff Writer
On X @GDsullysays
VOORHEES — It was Senior Night at Eastern Regional High on Tuesday, but that didn’t stop a couple of freshman from making a huge impact that helped lead the host Vikings to a 72-61 victory over visiting Mastery Camden.
Landon Bethea and Micah Fox scored 18 and nine points, respectively, and bailed Eastern out of some early second-quarter struggles, to help lead Eastern to its third straight victory and 10th in its last 12 contests.
Eastern’s three seniors — Sean Karbach, Nate Zanetich and Alex Grossman — did their share of heavy lifting, too. Karbach had 14 points, five rebounds and three assists, with a good portion of that coming in the third quarter when Eastern built a double-digit advantage, and Zanetich added 12 points, 16 rebounds and a pair of blocked shots. Grossman battled foul trouble all night but still chipped in three points, three rebounds and a steal.
“I just wanted to get a few points on Senior Night, but no one here is about themselves. Nate has had games where he’s had zero points, Sean and I have had games where we’ve had a limited amount of points. Nobody cares, as long as we get the win,” Grossman said. “I’d be very unhappy right now if we had lost this game, but I trust everyone on our team. I trust the freshmen — they lift us up sometimes when we’re not playing well, and that’s what they did tonight. Sean and Nate stayed steady the whole game while I was out. I have all the faith in the world in this team.
“We all know who Landon and Micah are by now,” he continued. “They’ve done this multiple times where they’ve taken the reins when Sean’s been in foul trouble or when Nate missed games with an ankle injury. They’ve led us through some games and I have all the faith in the world in them. I loved watching every minute of it.”
Eastern held Mastery Camden scoreless for nearly the first five minutes of the game, but behind a huge showing from junior guard Ezequeil Cosme the Warriors came storming back to take a 16-14 lead early in the second quarter. Cosme scored 17 of his team’s first 21 points and finished with a game-high 33, including a trio of 3-pointers.
“We tried to stop him, but he’s a very good player. He’s really fast, so we were just trying to stay in front of him and make sure he was seeing a body at all times,” Karbach said. “We stuck together. We just said we had to play harder (in the second half), we had to play faster and we had to match their intensity and speed. That was basically it. We really locked in on defense. Turnovers is our thing. We like to create havoc, get out on the fast break and score.”
Eastern (19-4, 4-3 Olympic American) got consecutive threes from Fox to take a 20-18 lead, but Cosme answered with a three of his own to give the Warriors a 21-20 lead. But those long-range shots from Fox sparked what eventually became a 15-5 run by Eastern that gave the Vikings a 33-23 halftime lead. Mastery Camden (13-10) got to within 40-34 on another three from Cosme with 3:17 left in the third quarter, but a 3-pointer from Eastern’s Ashton Fedore put the Vikings back up by 10 points and gave them some breathing room headed into the fourth quarter.
“We had to stop them from getting fast-break layups off of our press. We had to drop to a 2-2-1 (defense) to try to slow them down. Our biggest thing was scooting out of that press and playing more reserved. We thought we could kind of pack in the paint and force them to shoot threes, and Sean and I would be there to grab rebounds,” Zanetich said. “Our biggest thing as a team is we try to hold the other team to 12 points per quarter. One thing I think that we do great with is we don’t care who scores. We have two freshmen — one who had 18 points and one who had nine points — and even though it was Senior Night, we don’t care. It was unfortunate that Alex got four fouls on Senior Night, so he couldn’t play that much, but on the bench Alex was great for us; he just wanted us to win. The biggest thing that allowed us to stretch out the lead (in the third quarter) was that we didn’t care who scored, we just wanted to win.”
The Warriors got 16 points from Jo’Shawn Jackson, who hit four of Mastery’s seven 3-pointers, but the Vikings didn’t allow any other Warriors players to get more than six points. Meanwhile, Eastern saw 10 players score at least one basket, and as a team the Vikings connected on 28 shots compared to just 17 by the Warriors.
“We just know that we’re always going to stick together as a squad. We know that at any time Nate can get hot, Alex can get hot. Today, Landon got hot,” Karbach said. “We have five guys who can beat anybody offensively, and I think that if we just keep locking down on defense, sticking together and not blowing up on each other then the run will happen. Basketball is a game of runs.”
WHAT’S NEXT: Eastern closes out its regular season by hosting Cherokee on Thursday at 3:45 p.m. Mastery Camden hosts Sterling on Saturday at noon in the preliminary round of the Camden County Tournament.
