The Hillsdale College men’s basketball team’s season came to a disappointing end on Saturday night in the GLIAC Tournament semifinals in Ashland, Ohio. The eighth-seed Walsh Cavaliers scorched the Chargers, shooting 63 percent from the field en route to a 98-69 victory.
Hillsdale, on the other hand, shot just 38 percent from the floor and 27 percent from 3-point territory, prompting Chargers head coach John Tharp to call the game “probably one of our worst games of the year.”
“Walsh got incredibly confident, and it felt like anything and everything that they threw up was going to go in,” Tharp said. “It was one of those things where it got downhill on us pretty quick and the avalanche started.”
Three players scored 24 or more points for the Cavaliers, while only two players reached double figures for the Chargers. In the final game of their collegiate careers, senior forward Kyle Cooper scored 21 points and grabbed six rebounds, and senior point guard Zach Miller added 11 points.
Walsh opened up a modest lead in the first 10 minutes of the game and began to pull away in the latter part of the first half. The Chargers trailed by double digits from the 5:27 mark of the opening half through the end of the game.
“We were a little too soft defensively to start the game and it allowed them to find a rhythm early,” said Cooper, who was named to the GLIAC Men’s Basketball All-Tournament Team. “Once they find that rhythm, then it’s almost like it doesn’t matter what you’re doing from that point forward.”
After winning by their largest margin of the season in the opening round of the GLIAC Tournament on March 1 at Lake Superior State, the Chargers suffered their largest margin of defeat of the year against Walsh.
“I don’t really know what happened to be honest. Everything good that happened against Lake State seemed to be the exact opposite on Saturday,” Miller said. “That’s sports, sometimes the ball doesn’t fall you way. It just seemed like every loose ball, everything was just out of our reach.”
With the loss, the Chargers finish the 2015-16 season with an 18-10 overall record, tied for their highest win total in four years.
“We’re disappointed with how the season ended. We thought we were the hottest team in the GLIAC,” Tharp said. “It was a little bit of an emotional roller coaster, we did some good things, went through a bad time, picked ourselves up and battled and fought, so I think we’re all kind of still mad about how it ended.”
Cooper called his final season “a heck of ride.”
“I got to have a fun season with a bunch of my best friends, and we won more games than we lost,” Cooper said. “We had a couple rough stretches, but I felt like we always played as hard as we could, we just didn’t execute as well as we needed to.”
Miller said he didn’t have “any regrets” from his final season.
“I wasn’t ready for it to be over, but I think looking back, it was a good year and a great ride with these guys,” Miller said. “You couldn’t ask for a better group of guys — one through 18 — to be around.”
Now that his collegiate career has concluded, Cooper has started the process of deciding where he wants to play professionally overseas in the fall and what agent he should sign with.
Cooper said he will take this week off to rest, catch up on school work, and receive advice from former teammates who have signed with agents and are playing professional basketball in Europe. He also met with Tharp on Tuesday to get his input on possible agents.
“That’s a different world and a crazy world,” Tharp said. “He’s going to have a lot of different opportunities and so we’re just trying to figure out a guy that we think is a good person and is going to guide him the right way.”
Cooper said he’d like to end up in Spain, but ultimately the location doesn’t matter.
“Anywhere that I can play some professional basketball would be fun for me,” he said. “I know Germany, Spain, Bulgaria, anywhere I can get my hands on a basketball and get a jersey on.”
While Cooper figures out his future, Tharp is in the process of turning his attention to next season. Off-season workouts will begin after spring break, but Tharp is evaluating his current team and recruiting for future teams.
“The first thing you do is you always self-evaluate,” Tharp said. “You evaluate yourself as a coach and your staff and then your players and figure out what we need to do to keep improving.”
