The Hillsdale College men’s basketball team beat Wayne State University and Lewis University to finish its non-conference schedule 4-1.
After a tough loss to Ferris State in the team’s home opener two weeks ago, the Chargers bounced back to finish what Head Coach John Tharp called a brutal non-conference schedule.
“We have a lot of guys that have played a lot of minutes in the past so it felt like we were ready for the games, I think we just didn’t execute well against Ferris,” senior forward Austen Yarian said. “We’ve been practicing a lot on the defensive side, trying to look at the film, see what we were doing wrong and adjusting from there.”
The team’s defense improved following its loss, holding both Wayne State and Lewis to under 41% from the field. After giving up a season-high 89 points to Ferris State, the Chargers held both of their opponents to under 63 points.
“Ideally we’d like to be undefeated, but Coach Tharp always says you don’t want these games to be cakewalks in the beginning of the year, because they matter for tournament seeding at the end of the year,” junior forward Patrick Cartier said. “I’m glad we had a little bit of adversity, we played at least three tournament teams from last year, so I think we’ll be ready for tournament play.”
The front court came alive in their game against Wayne State. Cartier and Yarian combined for 42 points, 12 rebounds and five assists and four steals.
Against Lewis it was Junior Tavon Brown’s turn to stuff the stat sheet. Brown posted
The team is now preparing to begin its in-conference schedule with a pair of road G-MAC games later this week. They will take on Kentucky Wesleyan at 7:45 p.m. on Thursday and Trevecca Nazarene at 4 p.m. on Saturday.
“Both of them have a ton of transfers from Division I schools, so it’s a conference game but at the same time we haven’t ever played against some of these transfer guys, so it’s kind of like a non-conference game,” Yarian said. “We’re just doing everything we can to prepare for them, trying to watch as much film as we can, and just being ready to go but at the same time fine tuning our offense and being ready to compete.”
Following a home game against Ohio Dominican next Thursday, the team will have a total of six games while the rest of the student body is on break, three before Christmas and three after.
“All we do is practice so we have a lot of free time to just hang out with the guys, we try to do a couple of team bonding events now and then as well,” Yarian said. “Also every night for dinner, one of our parents from the team comes up and cooks dinner for us, so we’ll eat together every night. It’s also fun to just focus on basketball and not have to worry about school, just trying to get some wins.”
The Chargers are also looking to repeat as G-MAC Regular Season Champions, after taking a share of the title in 2020 and winning it outright last year. It would be the first three-peat as conference champions in program history.
“The last two years have been incredibly rewarding, to be a part of the achievement of the program from that standpoint,” Tharp said. “Two years ago we lost Davis Larson to injury and ended up winning our last six games and won the championship and last year was quite the run. This year’s team is still trying to figure things out, our focus is still on day-to-day type stuff, we know there’s a long way to go for us to start thinking about that.”
