The Hillsdale College men’s basketball team travelled to Ann Arbor to take on Division I powerhouse the University of Michigan on Saturday and hung with the Wolverines for much of the game before Michigan pulled away for a 92-68 win.
“We saw a lot of good things in certain stretches and then we had bad stretches too,” junior forward Kyle Cooper said. “There are a lot of positives to build on but we’re also going to learn from the mistakes and continue to improve.”
The Chargers got off to a fast start, jumping ahead 10-2 in large part to redshirt freshman Stedman Lowry’s hot shooting.
“We had nothing to lose,” Lowry said on his team’s mindset entering the game. “We were confident. We felt like we had a pretty good game plan and it was just a great atmosphere.”
Lowry scored 11 of Hillsdale’s first 15 points on 3-3 shooting from behind the arc.
“Stedman [Lowry] can really play,” head coach John Tharp said. “We think he’s going to be one of the great scorers we’ve ever had in our program.”
Lowry finished with 15 points in 28 minutes of action.
The Wolverines responded to Hillsdale’s fast start with several runs of their own, jumping out to a 50-33 halftime lead. But the Chargers weren’t about to go away quietly.
After a back-and-forth start to the second half, Cooper led the Chargers on an 8-0 run to cut Michigan’s lead to 10. That was as close as the Chargers would get.
“We started actually guarding them on defense,” Cooper said on his team’s fast start in the second half. “Once we slowed the game down and started running good offense it force them to play half-court offense with us. In the half-court we were really well prepared for the way they ran offense.”
Cooper finished with a double-double, pouring in 28 points and grabbing 10 boards. Twenty-one of his 28 points came in the second half.
“Cooper is our guy,” Tharp said. “We’re going to keep playing through him throughout the entire year and he has to be that good game in and game out.”
Cooper’s teammates were not surprised by his strong performance in a tough environment.
“He’s a beast. I knew he could go off like that,” Lowry said. “He’s one of the best D-II players around and you’re definitely going to see that this year because he’s a monster.”
While there were plenty of bright spots for the team to be proud of, the Chargers know there are many things they still need to improve.
“We want to take the positives and continue to build on them and we want to take the negatives and clean them up in practice,” Cooper said. “It’s just about cleaning up things that we can control.”
The Chargers will see the court next at Cedarville on Tuesday before the team returns to Hillsdale to host Salem International on Nov. 29 for their first game in the newly renovated Dawn Tibbets Potter Arena.
