Photo by Seth Staskey Union Local sophomore Hannah Merritt drives to the bucket as St. Clairsville’s Alexis Thoburn defends during the first quarter of Thursday’s game in Morristown. The Jets rolled to a 51-30 victory.

MORRISTOWN — It’s not hard to tell the bar for the Union Local girls basketball has been set relatively highly in the early going of this season.

Just how high is yet to be determined, but after the Jets’ 51-30 victory against St. Clairsville, there weren’t many smiles issued by coach Rob Barr.

“We won by 21, and I feel like we laid an egg (Thursday),” Barr said. “I told the kids if other teams see this on film, they have a blueprint for stopping us, but we stopped ourselves a lot, too.”

The Jets are now 8-0 and are on the road at Monroe Central Monday and then return home on Dec. 30 to take on Shadyside.

“It’s going to be a tough week,” Barr said. “On top of Monroe and Shadyside, we have Cambridge and Christmas in the middle of it. So, it’s a full week.”

St. Clairsville (4-2) opened the game by scoring the first five points. The next Red Devils bucket, which came upwards of nine minutes of game time later, made it 27-7.

“We couldn’t throw it in the ocean,” St. C. coach Stacey Agnew said. “My goodness. I didn’t think we played horrible defense, but we have to make shots. We work on it and we need to work on it more. We had good looks, but we started rushing once we got down.”

The Jets eventually held a 29-11 lead at the half.

“I was happy with our defense,” Barr said. “You hold a team to 11 points in a half, it’s going to be tough to lose a game doing that.”

St. Clairsville’s offensive struggles continued in the third when it tallied just five more points. The Jets, meanwhile, owned a 42-16 lead at the final break.

St. Clairsville, to its credit, dictated the tempo and didn’t allow the Jets to soar into transition a lot. And in the half-court set, especially in the second half, the Jets struggled to score the ball.

“The second half was sluggish, we missed a ton of easy shots and foul shots,” Barr said. “We have some give and take (offensively). I can’t get these girls to be patient enough to get the secondary part of the break. They have like a 10-second shot clock in their head, but they’re young and that’s how they play. It’s still a work-in-progress.”

The Jets were led by sophomore Keira Gregor, who scored 14 points. Junior Casey Kildow added 10. Freshman Reagan Vinskovich was held to just nine points, but she certainly made her presence felt on the interior by ripping down 20 rebounds.

Senior Keri Klinkoski scored 15 to pace the Red Devils.

“Our kids played hard and competed, but we have to learn from it,” Agnew said. “If we don’t learn anything from this, then shame on us.”