MARBLEHEAD — It’s early in the boys basketball game between Saugus and Marblehead on Monday night and already the Sachems surrendered the first eight points.
Mark Bertrand calls a quick timeout and gathers the players around him.
“You’re going to get run out of this gym if you don’t start doing the things I need you to do,” he tells his team, which is very young, and — right now — very confused.
“You take a kid like (senior) Mike Mabee,” says Bertrand after the game. “He grew up playing traveling team, and every week he saw Paul Moran in that gym. Then he plays for us, and he’s had Paul for three seasons. Now, it’s his senior year, and one game into it, Paul’s gone. It’s hard.”
Moran’s departure, about which the Sachem players found out Friday after their season-opening loss to Everett, is a health issue, not a coaching problem. Moran, said Bertrand, is one of the top two most successful basketball coaches in Saugus history. Both his sons, Joe and Chris, played for Moran, and both are playing at Norwich (Joe, the oldest is a former Item Player of the Year).
“We go back 10 years,” said Bertrand, tabbed by the school to be Moran’s successor — at least for now.
“Friday was a tough day,” he said. “I got the phone call in the middle of the afternoon. It was a very emotional phone call. He just felt like he couldn’t do it.”
When asked whether he’d want to take the job over on an interim basis, “I said ‘of course,'” Bertrand said. “Right now, the most important part of this is those kids. Not us (the coaches).
“It’s important that basketball be fun,” he said. “And of course, you have to work, and be a part of a team, but you want it to be a source of enjoyment too.”
Bertrand feels fortunate to have former Gloucester coach Bill Cahill beside him on the bench.
“I asked him if he wanted to stay and he said he did,” said Bertrand. “He didn’t have to. Paul brought him down here. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he chose not to. But he did. He said he wanted to finish what they’d started.”
Right now, the Sachems are very young, said Bertrand, and their inexperience showed at various times in Monday night’s game — an 81-35 loss to the Magicians.
“We ask that the play defense, and then be very, very patient on offense. We want to slow the game down. But that’s a hard thing to do, and it’s even harder when you’re young the way they are.”
Bertrand said rebuilding is a new experience for Saugus — at least while Moran was coach.
“We didn’t really have to do this,” he said. “We’ve had a pretty good run under Paul.
“We’ll get better,” he said. “It won’t always be like this.”
The Sachems had the misfortune, along with playing without their coach, of drawing two particularly tough opponents to start the season — Everett, which is among the top five Division 1 teams in Massachusetts; and the Magicians, who only lost once last year and have several players from that team back this season.
“How many kids do you think want to play a team like Everett, without their coach, in the first game of the year?” Bertrand asks.
With what the Sachems have going against them, Bertrand won’t make excuses.
“Right now, we just have to do a better job of preparing the kids to play,” Bertrand said.
“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “I liked some of what I saw tonight. We had kids diving all over the floor going after loose balls while we were down by 50 points. I can’t ask for more than that.”