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A halftime turnaround brings the Cardinals to 23-0

Men's Basketball

A halftime turnaround brings the Cardinals to 23-0

Following an uncharacteristic first half performance, the Cardinals picked up the pace and another victory on Saturday, beating out Utah State University-Eastern 79-68.
A first half riddled with missed rebounds, poor shot accuracy and fouls led the Cardinals to enter halftime down nine points on USU-Eastern.
“We’ve been fortunate in the first 20-somethings games to kind of be on the top side of things come halftime,” coach Corey Symons said. “So this was a big test for us to see how we could react after halftime.”
The Cardinals shot 30 percent on their field goals and only put up 27 points in the first half.
If things couldn’t have gotten worse for the team early on, one of the team’s leading scorers, Brayon (BJ) Blake received a technical foul within the first eight minutes of the game, causing the Cardinals to adjust their play.
“With BJ in foul trouble early on, that hurts us,” coach Symons said. “But it was really good for us because we haven’t faced a whole lot of adversity and that was the most adversity we’ve had all year, so it was good to see our guys respond to it.”
Blake still managed to put 21 points on the board by the end of the game as well as three steals and four assists to put himself just behind Braian Angola-Rhodas’ leading 31 points for the team.
Despite the team’s shaky performance in the first half, the team managed to come out strong in the second half, improving vastly on their performance in the first 20 minutes.
“They doubled our rebounds in the first half so that was something that we really had to work on,” sophomore Kyle Guice (F) said.

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Sophomore Brayon (BJ) Blake reaches for the jump ball to start the game against USU-Eastern. Despite receiving a technical foul eight minutes into the game, Blake still managed to put up 21 points by the end of the game (Katie Hartwig, Sentinel).

After a halftime that gave the guys time to think about their strategy and mindset, NIC’s second half performance was a game changer.
“We came out more focused, more energy; our energy was kind of down,” freshman Trey Burch-Manning (G) said. “We kind of let certain calls affect us and we just screwed our heads back on and realized we wanted to win more than we wanted to complain.”
To the fans, the arduous game for the Cardinals may have come as a surprise with USU-Eastern having few players to sub in, but the Cardinals were prepared for a battle early on.
“We knew they were a dangerous team coming in,” Guice said. “We just had to come out and play.”
Luckily for the Cardinals, they saw that the lack of subs was likely going to provide a weakness in the team to capitalize upon.
“They’ve got a great team,” coach Symons said. “Their problem is that they’re not very deep. They’ve only got six or seven guys that they play and it just wears on them.”
The unnatural close call for the Cardinals was one that coach Corey feels was a good reminder of how the tides of a team can change.
“We were really fortunate to come out with a win tonight,” coach Symons said. “They (USU-Eastern) were winning all the rebounding battles, they were winning all the 50/50 balls, they were just a step ahead of us. It was good for us to come out and grind and get that one out and we’ve got to watch the film and learn from it.”
The Cardinals will start a brief road trip in Utah against Salt Lake Community College on Thursday. Salt Lake is in a close second place spot in the conference behind NIC and the outcome of Thursdays game will decide if NIC can hold on to the top spot.
“We’ve always got to keep working hard being the team to beat,” Guice said.
Thursdays game will be available to watch on Cardinal Live Stream starting at 7:30 p.m.

Riley Hadeen is the sports editor for the Sentinel. This is his third semester at NIC. He enjoys mustard, hot sauce and, of course, sports.

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