BCAT News

The Burlington Boys Basketball team’s season has officially ended after losing to North Andover 76-57 on Monday night.

The Red Devils began the season with a 2-0 start following wins against Woburn and Wilmington. From there, games became more difficult as the season progressed.

By the end of December the team was standing in the division with a 4-2 record. Unfortunately, Burlington would only have three wins in the months in January after losing to division rivals, which include Melrose and Wakefield.

The team would go on to win another four games in February to close out the regular season with 11 wins and 9 losses.

Burlington had a chance at playoff action as they traveled to North Andover to take on the Scarlet Knights who were ranked at number six in the state.

Head Coach Phil Conners said the game plan going into North Andover was to prevent their offense from scoring and to not allow any turnovers. This would prove to be a difficult goal to achieve.

“They are very very talented, they played one of the hardest schedules in all of high school basketball,” Conners said. “They won the Division 2 North last year and brought the entire team back.”

Conners said his athletes need to keep up with practice and conditioning in the lead up to next season.

“I would hope the kids can take away the fact we need to work harder during the off-season,” Conners said. “Every year we are much better as the season goes on because we’re in the gym every day. We need to do that out season so we can hit the ground running.”

Finally, the Red Devils are looking to improve their skills and move up in the ranks come December.

“We lose a lot of production, so we need to really work to improve our individual skills,” he said. “We have very few guys who are varsity ready right now, but the exciting thing is that guys can change that in the next nine months and I’m excited to see who steps forward and make the biggest improvement.”