Every high school basketball coach will tell you that season-opening games are both exciting and stressful as after three weeks of practices their team gets to start the journey on truly finding their strengths, weakness and identity.

Marquette boys basketball coach Todd Hopkins saw a lot of good things from his group during Tuesday’s 75-20 pool play victory over Earlville at the Huskers Hardwood Tip-Off Tournament at Serena High School.

The Crusaders held an 11-7 lead with just over three minutes to play in the first quarter, then exploded on an 18-0 run over the next six minutes of game time, with every single one of those points scored at the rim and the defense creating a dozen Red Raiders turnovers

“I thought we did a solid job on the defensive end, boxed out well and had good communication,” Hopkins said. “Those are areas we’ve really stressed in practices that have to be there every game. I thought we had good intensity from start to finish.

“Offensively we did a great job of taking the ball to the basket aggressively. We also shared the ball and did a good job of making the extra pass.”

Marquette (1-0) — which led 23-7 after one quarter and 39-12 at halftime — was led by a game-high 17 points and five rebounds from sophomore Luke McCullough.

The Cru also received solid performances from junior Lucas Craig (13 points, five rebounds), junior Griffin Dobberstein (nine points, three rebounds, five assists), junior Easton DeBernardi (nine points, three rebounds), sophomore Slayden Cassel (eight points, seven rebounds, two blocks) and sophomore Sawyer Ernat (seven points).

Earlville (0-2) hung tough early on with junior Colton Fruit (nine points, five rebounds)) knocking down a pair of 3-pointers but couldn’t find a way to slow down Marquette the rest of the way.

“Our number one goal for tonight’s game was to cut down our turnovers,” Earlville coach Gerald Fruit said. “We had 35 turnovers [Monday] against Serena which is 25 more than I want. We were able to slice that number down to 20, which is still too many, but we made progress in that area. Most of that was the fact that we ran our offense much better than our first game. We looked a little less nervous.

“We lost four starters from last season, and we have a lot of inexperience on the floor right now. It’s just how it is. These first two games we’ve played two teams that are going to be pretty darn good throughout the year.

This is a group where, like tonight, we are going to have one or two goals we are going to try and reach each game. The ultimate goal is to get better every practice and every game. From Monday’s game to tonight we were able to do that.

Marquette is back in action on Wednesday against the Peoria Notre Dame JV at 2:30 p.m. Earlville is now off until Friday when they take the PND underclassmen.