JAY – Jay handled Winthrop’s full-court press well the first time it saw it at the start of Friday night’s Mountain Valley Conference game. Nick Bourassa fed Austin Clark for a layup that tied the score at 2-2.

The Ramblers then shook off whatever rust they had from nearly a week of inaction and smothered Jay with its trapping defense and superior quickness and savvy. Winthrop forced 13 turnovers in the first quarter and rarely let up from there while doubling up the Tigers, 84-42.

Senior guard Sam Leclerc finished one assist shy of a triple-double (23 points, 12 rebounds, nine assists) to lead the Ramblers, who hadn’t played since waxing Hall-Dale last Saturday, 81-48. Ezra Damm added 18 points and Andrew Smithgall 13 for Winthrop. Clark led Jay with 11 points and six rebounds.

The wheels fell off for the young Tigers (two seniors) moments after Clark’s layup. They turned the ball over on their next seven possessions, which is debilitating enough before one even considers that the Ramblers (10-for-16) weren’t missing much in the first quarter.

“When we’re shooting well with our pressure, we’re pretty good,” Winthrop coach Dennis Dacus said.

Damm answered Jay’s tying bucket by scoring six of Winthrop’s next eight points to spark a 29-5 Rambler run. Leclerc kept the floodgates open with his own personal 8-0 run, and Smithgall punctuated it with seven straight points as Winthrop (2-0) enjoyed a 31-10 lead at the end of the first period.

“We wanted to come out and bury them right away,” Leclerc said. “We’ve been off since last Saturday, so we’ve been waiting awhile. We’ve been really excited for this season and we went a week without a game, so we came out really psyched about this one and we were going hard, so we had plenty of energy.”

Though they let up on the pressure, the Ramblers continued to expend that energy in the second quarter. Leclerc matched his first quarter output with 10 points to boost the lead over the 30-point mark before giving way to the bench. The Tigers (0-3) made a little headway against Winthrop’s second unit, yet still found themselves down by 31 at the break thanks to Jordan Conant’s buzzer-beating 3-pointer.

“We can go right through our bench, about 10 deep,” Leclerc said. “If anybody needs a break, we can just cycle right through the bench and we don’t lose a step at all. We’ve got a lot of guys with good energy.”

The Ramblers refocused defensively for the third quarter, holding the Tigers scoreless until Clark hit a jumper with 1:30 left in the period. Winthrop led by 42 at the end of the third.

“Once you take the throttle off, bad habits start to happen,” Dacus said. “You don’t want bad habits, so you want to play like you’re going to play down the stretch against teams that push you to the fourth quarter.”

With that in mind, and a big, previously snowed-out, match-up with Boothbay looming on Monday, Dacus put his starters back on the floor about midway through the fourth quarter. Leclerc worked on getting his teammates more involved as the Ramblers built their largest lead, 47 points, before the top five went back to the bench with under two minutes remaining.

“He’s the hardest-working kid I’ve ever met and probably will ever meet,” Dacus said of Leclerc. “He literally shoots two or three hours a day. I mean, I would be surprised if tonight he goes to the Fayette gym and shoots for an hour or so.”