Despite late surge, UMHB men's basketball falls at No. 24 Trinity in controversial finish

File photo by Luke Zayas/True To The Cru

SAN ANTONIO — It had all the makings of being a must-see finish inside Calgaard Gym Tuesday night.

There was UMHB, on another one of its improbable late-game runs, rallying back from what had been an 18-point deficit a mere five minutes before. The Cru’s 18-2 run had cut Trinity’s lead to 77-75 with 53.5 seconds left.

And there was Trinity, the nation’s 24th-ranked team doing all it could to stave off the Crusaders’ charge and avoid having the rug pulled out from underneath them after leading since the 17:54 mark of the first half.

Then came two whistles in rapid succession. The first with 18.2 seconds to go, and the second with 11.8 remaining.

Both signified technical fouls against UMHB, despite nothing apparent or egregious having happened on the court or the Crusader bench at either juncture. Visible confusion was evident on the faces of head coach Sam Patterson and his team, whose momentum had suddenly been taken away in the heat of a one-possession game.

There would be no down-to-the-wire finish in the Alamo City. The intensity from both teams that had been building over the previous five minutes? Erased. And that was just the first technical, called on Patterson after Zach Engels’ driving layup missed off the back iron. The second on Donta Coady, as he fouled Carter Ruck, only added more free throws for Trinity in an anticlimactic final 12 seconds.

Trinity ended up with six free throws over the last 18 seconds, converting on four of them to seal an 82-77 win that improved the Tigers to 7-2 overall. UMHB dropped to 4-4, all four losses having come by single-digits.

“I hate that this took away from their fight to come back,” Patterson said postgame. “It was disappointing with how it finished. No coach, whether you win or lose, wants a game to end that way. I just hate that it might’ve taken away from the effort and the energy that it took to come back.”

Indeed, it was a comeback worthy of recognition, even with the game ultimately ending up in Trinity’s favor. Through eight games thus far, UMHB has proven one thing about its second half identity: there is no telling when The Cru will flip the switch, but when they do—and it is inevitable that they will—there is little the opponent can do to stand in their way.

Trinity became the most recent team to find that out firsthand on Tuesday, just three days after Whitworth saw its 17-point second half lead dissolve at hands of UMHB in a 92-90 Crusader win. For the sixth consecutive game, The Cru outscored its opponent in the second half, and for the third time since Nov. 29, Patterson’s squad erased a double-digit deficit in the second half to come within at least three points of the lead.

“These guys never stop fighting,” Patterson noted. “They never quit. We’re in every game no matter what the scoreboard says. You just get that feeling. The great thing about this team is it’s going to be a different five guys every night. You just don’t know which combination of five it will be, or seven or eight. We’ve got so much depth.”

At the under-4 minute media timeout, the comeback had already begun. Hudson Johnson connected on an acrobatic 3-pointer a minute earlier, getting an incredibly difficult long-range shot to fall with his team trailing 75-57. Engels and Josiah Wray then added layups on back-to-back possessions, sandwiched between a Trinity turnover, getting the Tigers’ lead to 11 when they huddled with 3:55 to go.

“The message in all the timeouts was, ‘We’ve got to get stops,’” Patterson said. “And we got several kills—three stops in a row—there at the end. We were able to attack off of our stops and play the way we want to play.”

The rest of the way, Trinity’s only points came at the free throw line, with the Tigers going the final 5:11 without a made field goal. While the 24th-ranked hosts went ice cold, UMHB’s shooting touch caught fire. With 2:52, Engels—who finished with a team-high 25 points—knocked down a 3-pointer off an offensive rebound, trimming the deficit to eight. Engels followed with another jumper, and four straight made free throws—two apiece from Connor Zamiara and Johnson—pulled The Cru all the way within two.

“We were just looking for anybody to get a combination out there that could spark us, and we found it,” Patterson said, noting the chemistry with the group of Johnson, Engels, Elijah Lawrence, Connor Zamiara, and Zach May, who were on the floor for the final 3:08. “On paper, it may have looked like we found it too late, but there’s no such thing with this team. Once they rally in, and dig their heels in, they’ve been able to come out and have really strong second halves.”

UMHB closed the game by making nine of its final 12 shots, with five of them coming from Engels. The senior’s 25 points marked a new career-high, as 19 came over the final 20 minutes in clutch fashion. Engels went 8-of-16 from the field and a perfect 8-of-8 at the free throw line while playing 31 minutes for the second time this season.

The Austin native also stepped up as a rebounder down the stretch, grabbing nine second-half rebounds to finish the contest with a team-high 12 boards. After being out-rebounded by 10 in the opening 20 minutes (26-16), The Cru flipped it in the second, getting back to their identity as one of the nation’s best offensive rebounding teams. UMHB more than tripled its first half offensive rebound total in the second, with 10, and won the overall battle on the boards in the second half, 24-15.

That aspect played no small role in helping pull The Cru back into contention after they trailed 42-34 at halftime.

“In the first half, I felt like Trinity was first to those loose balls and offensive rebounds,” Patterson noted, when asked about the rebounding emphasis in the second half. “We talked before the game about us being a Top-15 offensive rebounding team in the country. And this was an opportunity for us to prove it. Trinity came out early and I thought they were the better rebounding team in the first half. That was a challenge to them at halftime, and our guys responded to it.”

Trinity found success in the opening 20 minutes behind the play of senior guard Zach Fenn, who had 14 points in that span. Fenn and the Tigers repeatedly drove to the basket, rather than settling for outside shots, as Trinity found separation. 28 of Trinity’s 42 first-half points came in the paint, including 12 of the Tigers’ final 18 heading into the break.

UMHB struggled to defend consistently and Trinity’s zone defense and full-court pressure proved difficult to score on, setting up a challenging combination for the visitors from Belton. Some of that continued into the second half as Trinity widened the gap, though the Tigers also found a quick surge from the 3-point line. In a 66-second span starting with 15:48 left, Trinity connected on three-straight 3s, the first two from Dean Balo before Carter Ruck followed with another. The flurry of 3s pushed the Tigers’ lead to 57-42 and two possessions later, that advantage stretched to 17, as they went right back to the paint with a Jackson Lawson layup.

Of course, UMHB soon proved its ability to put together a scoring run as the second half carried on. UMHB shot 15-of-33 in the second half, a far better shooting mark than the 10-of-29 the Crusaders put up in the first.

The page quickly turns for The Cru, who return to the Mayborn Campus Center on Thursday night at 7 p.m. against Arlington Baptist (2-5). Another key road test follows on Sunday at undefeated Concordia (6-0), who received votes in Monday’s D3hoops.com Top 25 Poll.

“We have to have a short-term memory, but we’ve also got to learn from this,” Patterson said. “We need to take any frustration out in practice tomorrow, and lock in on Arlington Baptist. This is a stretch here where we’re playing great teams on the road.

“We had to battle adversity [tonight]. You’ll always face more adversity as a road team, whether it’s with travel or in the flow of the game and things not going your way. We could lose tonight like we did, but I think we can actually come out better because of it. But that’s yet to be determined. We’ll find that out on Thursday.”