Photo: Hudson Johnson had 17 points and several key assists in UMHB’s exceptional second half run on Saturday night (Photo by Luke Zayas/True To The Cru)
HOUSTON, Texas — There were a multitude of reasons as to why the challenge UMHB men’s basketball faced on Saturday evening was particularly immense.
St. Thomas was 4-1, its lone loss coming by a single point on the road at fifth-ranked WashU. The Celts entered having won 19 consecutive regular season home games in a streak going back to Jan. 21, 2024. They also ranked as the 24th-most efficient defense in the country. Points would be difficult to come by.
And for the first 25 minutes, that proved to be true. UMHB managed just 24 points in the first half, its lowest scoring output in the opening 20 minutes of a game this season. The Cru trailed by 10 at that point, and by the under-16-minute media timeout, that deficit had doubled to 50-30. 18 seconds later, UST widened the gap even further to 23 on a Nathan Kongolo 3-pointer.
Buried in that sort of hole, on the road, against a team receiving Top 25 votes, plenty of teams would have let it all unravel, unable to hold back the building momentum. But in the timeout with 15:37 left, UMHB head coach Sam Patterson implored his Crusaders to keep their focus on chipping away. If they could slice UST’s lead to 10 by the under-four-minute media timeout. Patterson felt they would have a chance down the stretch.
He was spot-on. It took time, but in a flurry of forced turnovers, defensive stops, and timely shots against the Celts’ athletic defenders, UMHB pulled closer, the comeback bid beginning to take shape. The Cru refused to give in, despite UST’s sizable lead.
“I called a timeout at the under 4 and it was a 12-point game,” Patterson said afterwards. “I’m like, ‘Man, we’re right here. This is right what we wanted. Get a stop and a score and we’re at 10 with under 4, and then it’s anybody’s game.’”
The next two minutes wrote the story of the second half. Between the 3:19 and 1:17 marks, The Cru went on an 11-2 run, going 3-of-4 from beyond the arc, while UST turned it over on three straight possessions. The third takeaway—a steal from Zach Engels—saw UMHB push the ball up the floor quickly, with Hudson Johnson firing a cross-court pass from the left wing to a wide-open Elijah Lawrence on the right wing. Lawrence buried the 3, cutting UST’s lead to a single possession, 69-66.
“I was proud of the resilience of our guys and the fight to never give up and battle,” Patterson said of what turned out to be a 36-16 run. “We threw a ton of adjustments in-game defensively, from playing a couple different variations of zone to playing full court to trying to mix it up. Our guys really handled that well. The first 25 minutes of the game was not how we wanted to open up, but those last 15 minutes, our guys really played for each other.”
As Patterson said later, UST seemed to make the big shots when they needed them, and the game’s final minute was no exception. With 31 seconds left in a four-point game, UST’s Reyce Allen scored on a fastbreak layup, pushing the lead back to 73-66. Time ultimately ran out on UMHB’s incredible charge back into contention, as the Celts sealed a 77-71 win at the free throw line in the closing seconds.
For UST, it completed a perfect 2-0 week against the ASC, following a dramatic 80-74 overtime win over ASC preseason favorite Hardin-Simmons on Tuesday. For The Cru, the loss dropped Patterson’s squad to 2-3 overall, heading into a Pacific Northwest trip for games against Whitman and Whitworth late next week.
All three losses have come by single digits, and in each case, UMHB trailed by three points for some portion of the final minute. Perhaps even more notable is the fact that the three opponents in those defeats—Trinity, LeTourneau, and St. Thomas—are a combined 13-3 to this point. In the big-picture, taking teams of that caliber to the wire in the season’s first month is a significant positive for Patterson’s first team in Belton, even as the narrow losses remain difficult in the moment.
“We aggressively scheduled in the non-conference so that it puts us in position for postseason,” Patterson noted postgame. “We’re not running from any competition, and the reason is we know we’re going to play these level of teams in the NCAA Tournament. And we’re going to be better because of it.”
By the 8:48 mark, UST still led by 22. All signs pointed towards the Celts defending their home court yet again in what was tracking to be their largest margin of victory against a D3 opponent this season. But with 7:24 left, on the heels of back-to-back turnovers, Engels connected on a 3 that soon sparked the game’s most impactful scoring run.
A senior from Austin, Engels’ contributions were key all evening as he notched his first 20-point performance since Jan. 6, 2024, leading The Cru with 23. He also grabbed the second-most rebounds (4) and tallied the second-most assists (4) in the contest for UMHB, even while playing the final six minutes with four fouls.
Engels had five of UMHB’s next 10 points in a 10-0 run heading into the four-minute timeout, as he, Hudson Johnson, and Zach May whittled the UST lead to 12. In that stretch of 3:15, The Cru found an offensive rhythm, making four of its six shots, with half of those coming from 3-point range.
The offense played a significant role in putting UMHB back into striking distance, repeatedly finding space and open looks on their trips down the floor with under 10 minutes left. But in the same stretch, the defensive performance had just as much to do with it. Between Engels’ 3 with 7:24 and Lawrence’s 3 with 1:17, The Cru held the Celts without a single made shot, as UST’s lone points came on a pair of free throws from Angel Johnson.
The hosts went 0-of-7 from the field in that span and turned it over six times as the visitors from Belton went on a 21-2 run. Considering the Celts came into Saturday averaging just 9.8 turnovers per game (the 27th-best average in D3), UMHB forcing six over a key six-minute stretch in crunch time proved especially notable.
For as much as the turnovers played to UMHB’s advantage late in the second half, they were equally important in fueling UST’s early advantage. The Cru had 18 turnovers—exactly nine in both the first and second halves—and UST finished with 27 points off those takeaways. In the span of less than a minute starting at the 14:21 mark of the opening half, UMHB turned it over on three consecutive possessions, each one leading to a layup from UST on the other end as the lead ballooned to 18-7.
Considering the Celts’ style of play on the defensive end—guarding ball screens tightly with trapping and lots of movement in a fine-tuned zone—the Crusaders knew running set plays would be difficult on Saturday. That forced UMHB to play more off of each other on their offensive possessions, reading and reacting to what the Celts were throwing at them defensively. Of course, that is a challenging task when UST’s athleticism and length is brought into the equation.
“Iron sharpens iron. Playing against really good athletes, and the way they play, how hard they play defensively is good for us to see,” Patterson said. “18 turnovers is way too many, but I do think it’s going through that process of understanding what we can get out of it.
“If we can learn from this experience, there’s not a lot of teams we’re going to play this year with that size and athleticism and who will make as many timely shots as they did. That’s what we can take from it, playing against that kind of athleticism and feeling like we got better, even though the scoreboard was a loss.”
UST built its lead out to 16 with 8:46 left in the first half, but in a precursor to the second-half comeback, The Cru responded just before halftime. A 10-0 run pulled UMHB within six, then an Engels layup and a 3-pointer from Johnson cut the deficit to 27-24 with three minutes left. But the Celts defense buckled down, holding UMHB to four straight missed shots, and the Celts found buckets when they needed them most, ending the half on a 7-0 run.
But while UST’s points off turnovers and defensive ability kept The Cru at bay for much of the opening 20 minutes, UMHB made adjustments at halftime and into the second half that set up the thrilling finish.
Perhaps none was bigger on the offensive end than UMHB finding ways to get the most out of its paint touches, both scoring inside and passing out of those spots on the floor. It positively impacted the entire outlook against UST’s zone defense, as The Cru nearly doubled its assist total between the two halves—five in the first, nine in the second—and put up 20 paint points in the second 20 minutes compared to 12 in the first.
“This wasn’t a game we could come in and run a lot of set plays against,” said Patterson. “It was going to be a lot of playing with each other and getting downhill, and making plays as we got paint touches. I think it took about 20 minutes to get adjusted to where we would look when we got paint touches, but our guys adjusted well over the course of the game.”
In addition to Engels’ 23-point performance, May put up nine points, hitting a pair of timely 3s in the midst of the 21-2 second-half run. Johnson added 17 on a day that saw the senior guard go 3-of-4 from beyond the arc, while dishing out five assists. Grant Jessen also stood out in his 18 minutes off the bench despite not scoring, as the junior gave The Cru quality defensive minutes and grabbed a team-best five rebounds.
“I thought Grant impacted the game a ton,” Patterson noted of the 6’4 forward. “His presence defensively and rebounding-wise was key, and he’s somebody who can impact the game without his scoring.”
Saturday opened a four-game road swing for The Cru, who take their first out-of-state trip of the season to Washington for two games on Thursday and Saturday of next week. Whitman is 3-2 overall while Whitworth enters the week at 4-0, ranked No. 25 in the Week 1 D3hoops.com Top 25 poll.
