When St. George’s head coach Dwayne Pina brought this season’s team together for the first time at last summer’s NEPSAC Scholastic Showcase, they set some goals for the upcoming year.
The first one was accomplished on Wednesday night.
With its 67-44 win over Belmont Hill on Wednesday night, St. George’s clinched the 2024-25 ISL championship outright. With one league game to go against Middlesex on Saturday, the Dragons own a 13-1 record in ISL. Three teams behind them – Governor’s, Tabor and Rivers – have three losses and cannot mathematically catch up.
“To see that come to fruition today when we started talking about that last June and here we are on February 26, eight months later, and having accomplished that, it was a proud moment for our guys,” Pina said.
It’s St. George’s first ISL championship since it won a share of the title with Brooks in 2020, which was former star and current Knicks guard Tyler Kolek’s senior season. In the process, the Dragons ended Rivers’ recent run of ISL dominance after the Red Wings had won the last two league championships.
Pina thought his group was capable of winning the ISL last season, especially after an early victory over Rivers. But midseason losses to Lawrence Academy and Governor’s spoiled their run. This season, the Dragons have left nearly no doubt. With a strong nucleus back that includes Merrimack commit Dylan Veillette (Ridgfield, Conn.), top 2026 guard Dywane Chess and the midseason return of Rhode Island commit Barrett Loer (Millis, Mass.), they rolled to a 12-0 start in ISL play this season. Then they ran into a buzzsaw on Monday.
St. George’s needed just one win in its final three games to clinch the outright title, but were handed a humbling 77-61 road loss to Tabor. The Dragons fell behind 10-0 and didn’t recover. Pina said his group wasn’t ready physically and emotionally in a high-level road environment, and it offered them an important learning lesson.
“That was very disappointing,” Pina said. “Tuesday, we watched a lot of film. We had some pretty candid and real conversations about our energy and approach to games, and our inability the night before to handle it. I was proud of the way the guys responded.”
After a 15-1 start to the season that included 14 wins by double digits, St. George’s has slowed down over its last handful of games. Pina described it as “cruise control mode.” The Dragons beat four-win Roxbury Latin by just two on Feb. 14, and lost to Mount St. Charles last Friday before Monday’s blowout defeat to Tabor. That stretch seems to have been a needed wake-up call for a team that knows it’s good but may have taken some success for granted.
St. George’s, which is now 24-4 this season, could climb to as high as a No. 3 seed for next week’s Class AA playoffs depending on the rest of this week’s results. The Dragons are a dangerous group; with the aforementioned trio of Veillette, Loer and Chess in addition to guards Allyn Wright (Windsor, Conn.), YanCarlos Cueto and Ethan Njenga (Lowell, Mass.), they have the talent and firepower to match up with most teams in the class. Now, after overcoming a bump of adversity en route to claiming an ISL title, they’re ready to make even more noise.
“We’ve gotten checked and challenged in multiple games over our past five or six, and (Wednesday) we put our foot back on the gas, sort of like we were doing early on in the year,” Pina said. “I think we have an expectation now to play well, and if we play well, we’re going to win. I think we had a little bit of slippage in that where they might have just expected to win. I tell our guys all the time, we have talent, but we might not always be the most talented team, and we have to play well every possession and we have to do what we practice. I thought we got a little bit away from that. The loss against Tabor may be one of those additions by subtraction. We got back to where we wanted to be.”
