By CLAUDE SCILLEY

No, Suche James said, that’s not the way the Frontenac Falcons are supposed to win basketball games.

“That’s not the intention,” the Falcons coach said, after his team, treating the paint like it was quicksand, nonetheless defeated the Bayridge Blazers 63-41 in a high school senior boys basketball game Tuesday.

It’s a victory Frontenac wouldn’t have attained had it not been for some three-point shooting that was, at times, uncanny. The Falcons drained a dozen shots from beyond the three-point arc, most of them uncontested, four of them in a first quarter they finished with a 16-9 lead.

Six different Frontenac players had a three-point basket—four of them more than one—but James insisted his is not a team built around the three, “though we sure looked like that today.”

“That’s not our intention to sit out there all day and just enjoy that,” he said. “We just got so hesitant on offence. We weren’t engaged in the game for a long time.”

The flat performance came after a weekend tournament in which the Falcons played well, James said, noting it's a phenomenon that happens “very often, actually.”

“We had a good weekend; played really well,” he said, “(but) we didn’t play with the same type of energy on the offensive end (today) as we did on the weekend.

 “We didn’t settle for those just-launching-it-from-the-perimeter types of shots.”

Though Bayridge trailed 36-20 at halftime and never got closer to the lead than nine points after that, James credited the Blazers for displaying a challenging zone defence.

“They did a good job of getting us to do what they wanted us to do,” James said. “We fell right into that. We should have attacked it more. We just didn’t.”

Playing at Bayridge, where the home team is now 0-3, Tristan Halladay led Frontenac with 20 points, 10 of them scored in the first quarter. He authored four of the aforementioned three-point baskets.

Connor Vreeken, with 11 points, and Brendan Steele, with 10, also reached double figures for the Falcons. Steele, Jack Rowlatt and Max Ferguson each had a pair of three-pointers.

As Frontenac began lighting it up with threes early in the ball game, the Blazers tried to follow suit, but they couldn’t match their opponent's success. They managed just three baskets from beyond the arc in the game, though they probably took as many shots from downtown as did the Falcons.

Alas, the neither could the Blazers muster anything under the basket, either, until Jordan Carr came off the bench in the second quarter.

Matt Brash led Bayridge with 14 points, while Carr had a career-best 12, including six of his team’s 11 points in the second quarter.

With the win, Frontenac moved into sole possession of first place at 4-0. It’s a record the Falcons have fashioned with winning margins of 42, 31, 19 and 22 points, albeit against four teams that collectively are 2-10 to date.

Bayridge, meanwhile, fell to 1-3.

In the only other senior boys game in the Kingston Area Secondary Schools Athletic Association Tuesday, the Queen Elizabeth Raiders defeated the La Salle Black Knights 68-50. Playing on their home court, the Raiders got 22 points from Tyler Bark as they improved to 1-1.

La Salle, which fell to 0-3, got 20 points from Cody Webb.

In Wednesday’s only senior contest, the Holy Cross Crusaders, who have played just one game so far in their regular schedule—and won it—will visit QE.