Head coach John Tharp was honored for his 500th career win before the Hillsdale men’s basketball team buried the Cedarville Yellow Jackets, 87-57, in the quarterfinals of the G-MAC Tournament.
Tharp was given a painted game ball as a surprise tribute video from former players played on the big screen in Dawn Tibbetts Potter Arena.
“It was very emotional for me, a lot of those guys up on that screen have meant a great deal to me, those guys are like family to me,” Tharp said. “My wife and two of my three kids were there, so there’s a lot of people who have sacrificed a great deal to be a coach’s wife and a coach’s kid and stuff like that.”
Tharp remains the winningest coach in program history, and became the 17th active DII men’s basketball coach to reach 500 wins.
“It’s an absolute blessing and honor to play for coach Tharp as a coach, but it’s also an incredible blessing to have him as a mentor and a leader and a friend, and to be a part of the family that he’s worked so hard and given so much for,” Kalthoff said.
After suffering back-to-back losses to end their regular season, the Chargers dropped to the No. 3 seed in the conference tournament, where they matched up with the Yellow Jackets for the second straight year.
During last year’s semifinals game, a costly Charger turnover with five seconds left led to a last-second upset that knocked Hillsdale out of the tournament.
This year, however, balanced scoring and a strong second half helped the Chargers win only their second G-MAC tournament game in the last four years.
“I think we did a really good job, especially starting in the second half, guarding the 3-point line,” fifth-year guard Jack Gohlke said. “In the first half they hit seven threes on us, which is what they do, they’re a very good shooting team, but in the second half we did a much better job of limiting their strengths in that regard.”
The team’s two starting fifth-years, Gohlke and forward Peter Kalthoff, led the team in scoring in what will likely be the final home game of their careers, with 19 and 18 points respectively.
JUMP
“It was great to have all the fans there, it was a great atmosphere and so much support, I’m really honored to play for the community and the crowd,” Kalthoff said. “After the game, I was talking to some of my fellow seniors, and we were just saying ‘yeah, it’s super sad but we’re excited to keep playing and so thankful for the opportunity to play out in front of those people that were there.”
Both players did the bulk of their damage in the second half, scoring 25 of their combined 37 points after halftime.
Overall the team dropped 50 second-half points, nearly out-scoring Cedarville’s game total after halftime.
“Part of our style of play is we like to wear people down,” Tharp said. “We talk about wearing them down by making them guard. We’re hard to guard for an entire game if we’re running stuff that we’re supposed to be running and doing what we’re supposed to be doing.”
The win came after a 16-point loss to Hillsdale’s conference rival, Findlay, in the team’s season finale.
“Especially defensively, we just struggled,” Gohlke said. “We did a poor job of guarding the three-point line, they got going early on us, hitting a lot of threes. It wasn’t necessarily one guy, I think we were just worrying too much about our individual matchup that we were guarding, and not helping each other as much.”
The loss was the second in a row to end the Chargers’ regular season, following a, 80-67 loss in Ashland the week prior. The game took Hillsdale out of the conference lead and into the third spot, behind Walsh and Ashland. Ultimately, this took the Chargers out of contention to host the semifinals and final game of the conference tournament.
The day after the game, on Sunday, the team met to re-gather themselves and look back on the regular season, in which the team finished with a 22-5 record after losing first team all-American Patrick Cartier to graduation.
“We took a little bit of a deep breath on Sunday,” Tharp said. “We talked about the regular season year, and how good of a year it was, and then we showed them the ugliness of Saturday. We had to do that, we had to have honest conversations about how we played on Saturday, just our overall performance. That wasn’t pleasant for anyone, but they had to see it, and they handled that great.”
After taking down Cedarville on Tuesday, the stage is set for a monumental semifinal clash between Hillsdale and Ashland, who beat the Chargers in both regular season meetings, which cost the team a shot at the conference crown.
“We’re trying to get into the killer mindset and letting the desire for revenge fuel us,” Kalthoff said. “We’re super excited for an opportunity to face this team again.”
Ashland is the only team to beat Hillsdale at home this year, and accounts for two of the team’s three largest losses this season.
“We’ve played one good half of basketball against Ashland, that was the second half in Hillsdale,” Tharp said. “We have to be better defensively. Part of that is they’re really individually gifted as a basketball program, so we have work to do to try to guard them.”
