Marquette forward Ty Lotterman gets past Gladstone’s Ian Schwalbach to make a basket during the game Tuesday Dec. 17th, 2019 at Marquette Senior High School. (Journal photo by Amy Grigas)

MARQUETTE — Have four players score in double figures and your team is bound to have a good night on the basketball court.

Juniors Ty Lotterman and Kam Karp, along with senior teammates John Thomson and Drew Wyble, combined for 67 points to help the Marquette Senior High School boys basketball team cruise to an 84-54 victory over Great Northern Conference foe Gladstone in the Redmen’s home opener at MSHS’ Barb Crill Gymnasium.

Marquette set the tempo after racing out to an 11-0 lead. The Redmen threw up 77 shot attempts and sank 36 to improve to 3-0.

“I thought we came out with a lot of energy and kind of jumped on them early,” MSHS head coach Brad Nelson said. “It was on the verge there in the first quarter where I thought we could kind of blow the doors open, but credit Gladstone, they had a great second quarter and kind of stopped the bleeding a little bit, but I thought the third quarter was the key. We went on a pretty good run to end it and that’s what you need to do in those types of games.”

The Redmen finished the third quarter on a 7-1 run, which included a deep triple from Thomson at the buzzer to put his team up 67-39.

Thomson’s buzzer-beating 3 aided his 18-point night, which was matched by Karp. Lotterman led all scorers with 21 while Wyble also scored 10.

“We spread the ball around,” Nelson said. “Any guy can score that’s out on the court. We didn’t even have (junior guard) Lincoln Sager, who’s a prolific scorer. There are good things that I saw, but there’s also a lot of things that we’ve got to get better at offensively.

“Scoring 84 points, we just had a lot of possessions. We need to clean up our half-court sets. We didn’t do a good job of executing, we didn’t do a good job of screening. But that’s something we’re going to work on over the next few weeks.”

Gladstone suffered its first loss and head coach Dane Quigley wasn’t hesitant to admit it was simply one of those off-nights as his team dropped to 2-1.

“Just about everything that could go wrong went wrong for us,” he said. “Marquette is fast, they can shoot and they’re an extremely athletic team. We had a real hard time keeping up with them. We thought we were a pretty fast team, but man, they’re fast.

“It was really hard to keep up with them. We couldn’t execute anything early on offensively, which really slowed us down and got us into a hole right away, and then we just couldn’t mount a comeback at all.”

Quigley added his team will quickly shake this one off going into the Christmas break before facing rival Escanaba on Dec. 27.

“I talked to the guys in our locker room about this game,” he said. “It’s our first loss of the season. It’s a tough loss, a conference game, but we’ve got Escanaba right around the corner so we’ve got to focus on them and focus on getting back into the winning column.

“We’ll be prepared for Escanaba. It’s just about taking this loss, putting it behind us and moving on to the next game.”

The Braves were paced by junior Rane Castor with 14 points, while senior Jarrett St. John had 12. Gladstone was 23 of 53 from the field.

A quick layup from Karp on a pass from Wyble opened the scoring for MSHS. Lotterman followed with a bucket of his own before Thomson tripled from the left corner to make it 7-0, his first of four treys for him. Consecutive baskets from Karp and Lotterman after that made it an 11-0 Redmen lead before St. John put Gladstone on the board with a 3-ball of his own over three minutes into the game. MSHS led 23-10 after the first.

Marquette led by as many as 17 points in the second. The Braves were able to cut the lead to 11 with a free throw from junior Cam Ballard, making it a 34-23 game, but the Redmen went on a 10-point run to end the half including triples by Thomson and Karp to go up 44-23 at the break.

Marquette shot nearly 47 percent from the field and was 2 of 3 at the free throw line. Gladstone was 43 percent shooting and 6 of 10 at the line.

The Redmen picked up 39 rebounds with Lotterman and Wyble each grabbing eight. The Braves had 27 rebounds with Castor, Caden Alworden and Dayton Bernson each collecting five.

Marquette has a full holiday break before traveling to rival Negaunee on Jan. 3 and hosting Alpena on Jan. 4.

“We look forward to it, but we’re going to spend the first half or first three-quarters of the break focusing on us,” Nelson said. “We’ve got to get better at a lot of different areas of the game and on both ends of the court. After Christmas, we’ll start focusing on Negaunee and Alpena.”