Staff photo by Ari Selvey Minnesota Valley Lutheran’s Pierson Brau finishes a slam dunk during a South Central Conference boys basketball game against St. Clair Friday at MVL high school.

NEW ULM — Minnesota Valley Lutheran scored a season high in points to down St. Clair 96-71 in a South Central Conference boys basketball game on Friday.

“We were just playing well,” MVL head coach Craig Morgan said. “We weren’t playing well last night [a 81-54 loss to Norwood Young America]. Norwood’s a good team and took us out of anything we wanted to do. And tonight, the guys just said, ‘Hey, we need to push restart and come back,’ and it’s a whole new game.”

MVL saw contributions from all across the lineup, with four players reaching double digits.

“There is not one guy that’s a real go-to guy,” Morgan said. “Luke Merseth did not have a good scoring game, but everybody else picked it up for him. He had a good rebounding game. And then Pierson [Brau] went off and cut loose and got some steals, Owen [Birkholz] was active, Connor [Bode] and Brennan [Bendix], then Eric [Sorenson] came in there, everybody did a nice job. Even Blake Sexton in the beginning of the half. It was a good team effort.”

Brau led MVL in scoring on the night with 18 points, including two dunks. It was the first time that the freshman had dunked multiple times in a game.

“I’m glad I can do something like that just to get us all pumped up,” Brau said. “So we can all play to the best of our God-given abilities.”

Brau said the team had a lot of talent to go around and didn’t need to lean on one player for scoring in the game.

“We’re all so gifted,” he said. “Everybody can do everything we need them to do. So we just trust each other, and they’ll perform.”

Also for MVL, Birkholz had 17 points, going 4 for 4 from behind the arc and 5 for 5 on free throws, while Bendix had 12 points. Ethan Schauland added 11 points.

St. Clair initially took a 7-0 lead to start the game, but MVL took its first lead of the game on a transition layup from Schauland to go up 10-9. A 3-pointer from Connor Bode extended the lead, but St. Clair fought to take a 17-16 lead a few possessions later.

Bendix hit a free throw to take a 22-21 lead and MVL never lost control of the game again, going up by as much as 35-27 on Brau’s first dunk in the first half. St. Clair fought back to cut the lead down to 37-33, but a jumper from Blake Sexton, a layup from Schauland and a 3-pointer from Bode saw MVL up 44-33 at the end of the half.

MVL started out the second half slow, but so did St. Clair as scoring dipped to open the half.

“It was just laziness and coming out unfocused out of the half,” Morgan said. “I think we could have come out with a little fire. And they played rough too. It wasn’t clean coming out in those first six minutes, eight minutes or so. It was kind of ugly for both teams, and we just out-uglied them and played better.”

MVL picked things back up with a putback from Trace Gunderson as the Chargers went on a quick 6-0 run to go up 58-41. MVL followed that with an 8-0 run, capped of by a steal-and-score by Bode, to go up 70-51 and force a Cyclones timeout.

A 3-pointer by Birkholz gave the Chargers their biggest lead of the night, 73-52. MVL kept the lead close to 20 for several minutes, with Sorenson scoring 9 of MVL’s next 11 points including a 3-pointer, until subs entered for the final few minutes. MVL’s reserves helped contribute to the high point total, as Wyatt Feucht hit a 3-pointer and Micah Horak finished through a foul to push the point total from 91 to 96 to close the game.

MVL (8-7, 2-2) hosts Sleepy Eye St. Mary’s on Monday.