NEWS: UMHB Men’s Basketball to face Trine, the reigning national champion, in the upcoming season

Photo by Luke Zayas/True To The Cru/LukeZayasMedia

BELTON-UMHB head men’s basketball coach Clif Carroll is not afraid to test his squad right out of the gate. 

Two seasons ago, The Cru opened the season on the West Coast, facing Claremont-Mudd-Scripps, Redlands, and 12th-ranked Pomona-Pitzer in a four-day span, with all three going on to finish the regular season with at least 19 wins. Last season, The Cru played in the prestigious Jack Sikma Invitational at Illinois Wesleyan University, taking down Brody Fox—the nation’s leading scorer—and UW-Stout, followed by a massive 71-68 victory over IWU the following night for the tournament championship. 

This season, the Crusaders will have the reigning national champion to contend with on opening night. Trine University, who won the program’s first Division III national title in March, released its 2024-25 schedule on Wednesday morning. The first game on the slate for the Thunder? A 7 p.m. ET matchup against UMHB on November 8, set to be played inside Trine’s state-of-the-art MTI Center, which seats 3,500. According to UMHB’s opponent history, this will be the first-ever matchup between these two programs. 

Trine went 29-4 during its remarkable 2023-24 season, defeating Hampden-Sydney in front of a crowd of 4,546 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the national championship game. Head coach Brooks Miller was named the winner of the Glenn Robinson Award, annually awarded to the top NCAA Division III coach, and Trine finished the year ranked No. 1 in the D3hoops.com Top 25 Poll for the first time. The Thunder won the final six games of the season and went 6-2 against nationally-ranked opponents during the 2023-24 campaign. Heading into 2024-25, Trine is projected to bring back several key members of the national championship squad, including Fred Garland, who enters his senior year after starting all 33 games and averaging 13.7 points per game. 

The Crusaders are coming off a challenging 17-10 campaign in 2023-24, having seen a number of highs and lows over the course of the winter. However, UMHB defeated both ETBU and Hardin-Simmons in the ASC Tournament, nearly winning the league tournament title if not for a buzzer-beating layup from UT-Dallas’ Donovan Souter, which earned the Comets a 78-77 victory. UMHB enters the 2024-25 season seeking its third NCAA Tournament appearance since 2022, and is set to return multiple starters from last year’s team, including Eli Beard (18.6 PPG, 26.8 minutes/game) and Josh Goings (6.8 PPG, 23.5 minutes/game).