AUBURN – If Yarmouth coach Adam Smith’s loud locker room exhortations didn’t prevent his team from having a letdown Saturday night, St. Dom’s persistence did.

Unbeaten Yarmouth jumped out to a 21-9 lead after a quarter, then had to fight tooth-and-nail to hold off the Saints for the next 20 minutes before pulling away with a 71-57 victory at Callahan Family Gymnasium.

Senior point guard Lucas Denning played an outstanding all-around game for the Clippers, filling the stat sheet with 16 points, six rebounds, 13 assists and four steals. Ben Groves tallied a team-high 20 points and six rebounds. Greg LaBonte paced St. Dom’s with 20 points and nine rebounds, while Dave Roux added 13 points and Aaron Allen 11.

With his team coming off a huge win at Greely earlier in the week and facing a rivalry tilt with Freeport early next week, Smith was concerned his team might look past the Class C Saints. But the Clippers came out and crashed the offensive boards and flustered the Saints into 11 first-quarter turnovers with a full-court trap. They attempted 18 shots to St. Dom’s six to build the 12-point cushion.

“There’s going to be a moment in the season where you’re going to have a letdown, and we haven’t had one yet,” Smith said. “I just felt like tonight might have been one of those nights. This would have been the perfect game to have a letdown. I don’t think we played great – I think St. Dom’s had something to do with that – but I don’t think we had a letdown, either. We played extremely hard ourselves.”

Yarmouth (8-0) kept the pressure on throughout the game, but St. Dom’s (2-6) started not only handling it, but getting good shots off of it. The backcourt of Roux and LaBonte combined for 15 of the Saints’ 19 points in the second quarter as they whittled the deficit to eight by halftime.

“I heard that they take a lot of chances in the open court, so if we beat it, we’d have open look after open look,” St. Dom’s coach Ryan Deschenes said. “We got it sideline, middle, and then we had numbers every time. We had layups with guys taking it all the way or we had penetration and dish for open 3s.”

“They handled our pressure really well. Their guards are extremely quick,” Smith said. “They had opportunities and they knocked them down. People haven’t done that to us this year. They might have broken the pressure, but they haven’t hit those big shots. I was impressed with their poise.”

Roux showed poise in drilling a 3-pointer off the press, then finding Nate Andrew for a bucket that sparked a 9-0 Saints run in the third quarter. LaBonte’s fastbreak layup off a Yarmouth miss pulled the Saints to within 42-37 with 4:17 left in the quarter.

They couldn’t make any headway after that, however, as Robb Arndt (10 points) hit a 3-pointer to answer a LaBonte trey and push the Yarmouth lead back up to eight at the end of three. The Saints hovered within about 10 points early in the fourth quarter before Denning drilled a long 3-pointer, then threw a long pass to John Murphy for a layup that put the Clippers up by 16 with three minutes left.

“(Denning) is a catalyst for us,” Smith said. “St. Dom’s was pressing us in the fourth quarter and everybody cleared out for him. Lucas will get it down the floor for us. He takes that responsibility and he makes everybody better because they can get the ball where they want to and at the right time.”