Photo: Donta Coady had 15 points in 32 minutes on Sunday, helping lift UMHB men’s basketball to its sixth win of the season (Photo by Luke Zayas/True To The Cru)
AUSTIN — Concordia’s push came with just under seven minutes left on Sunday afternoon.
The Tornados, 6-0 to start the 2025-26 campaign, trailed by 13 with 6:45 to go. But with an up-tempo style that can flip a game in an instant, and playing in front of a home crowd, there was little doubt they would eventually make a charge at UMHB’s double-digit lead.
The question was how The Cru would answer it.
Between the 6:13 and 5:09 marks of the second half—a span of just 64 seconds—Concordia put together an 8-3 run, connecting on four straight shots, each of which came off a Crusader turnover.
With Concordia boasting an 11.3 turnover margin going in, UMHB head coach Sam Patterson knew turnovers would be a difference-maker. Suddenly, in one of the game’s most crucial stages, the Tornados had turned four straight takeaways into four straight scores. The UMHB lead dwindled to seven, 75-68, when Treymayne Martin’s jumper fell through the net.
“I told the guys it was time to buckle down, because you could sense a little momentum shifting back to Concordia,” Patterson said afterwards. “I felt like we responded really well and not let it get over the edge during that run. We were able to fight back and deliver blows instead of being the ones to keep taking them.”
UMHB countered Martin’s jumper with five straight points of its own in a 33-second stretch, stretching the lead back to 12. Zach Engels converted on a free throw, followed by scores in the paint from Grant Jessen and Elijah Lawrence. The Cru dispatched Concordia’s momentum surge with a statement response of its own, and while the Tornados scored 14 points over the final four minutes, UMHB just kept answering on the offensive end.
The Crusaders outscored their former ASC rivals, 62-48, over the final 20 minutes of the 96-82 victory, the program’s largest margin of victory over Concordia on the road since a 92-77 win on Jan. 5, 2009.
“I said the team who has the most poise over these last four minutes of the game is going to come out ahead,” Patterson recalled of talking to his team in the final media timeout with 3:59 left. “I thought our guys were poised. I told them, you know you’re poised when you have maturity. It takes a level of maturity, and then a level of understanding what’s at stake to be able to lock in and finish a game like that.”
UMHB is now 6-4 through Patterson’s first year as head coach, a resume that includes notable wins over Whitworth and Whitman in addition to Sunday’s quality result. And that’s not to mention the fact that The Cru has played three games against current Top 25 teams—twice facing Trinity and once battling St. Thomas—with all three losses decided by six points or less. The non-conference schedule is ripe with challenges, which have only seemed to build UMHB’s season identity.
“It’s great for us, just because we’ve faced so many different styles,” Patterson said. “That’s what I love about Division III. You can face a Whitworth team that’s all 6’7 and higher, and very skilled. Or you can face a Concordia team that’s 6’2 and under, really fast-paced, and athletic. The ability to win in a variety of different ways is only going to help us as we progress through the season.”
Previous experience came into play on Sunday as well, considering UMHB’s prior wins over fast-paced, pressing teams in Belhaven on Nov. 22 and Arlington Baptist on Thursday of this past week. The 107-78 defeat of ABU in particular served as valuable prep for Concordia, considering the importance of taking away fast-break opportunities against a team with tremendous athleticism and speed while also not abandoning the offensive rebounding effort.
For UMHB to pull down 20 offensive boards against the Tornados—which produced 17 second-chance points—it required heightened awareness from all five Crusaders on the floor. If four or five crashed to the glass for the rebound, and it ended up in Concordia’s hands, there was no preventing a fast-break layup. But when the roles were executed simultaneously, it allowed for quality second-chance scores, as three went for the rebound with the other two getting back down the floor in the event that Concordia pulled down the missed shot.
“Our emphasis on the offensive rebounding was our “get-back” guys getting back within two seconds or less,” Patterson added. “Our first two steps getting back in transition would set the tone. I thought that was an area we struggled with in the first half against Arlington Baptist. We kept trying to pick up the ball in the backcourt instead of getting back beyond halfcourt to level off the ball.
“It almost took that first half against Arlington Baptist to be able to win this game today. It’s building on past experience, whether positive or negative, because those habits will help you out later on. The fact that we went through that struggle in the first half and could highlight it on film, we could emphasize [today], ‘Whoever has rim has to sprint back. Whoever has ball has to sprint back. Our other three guys can offensive rebound.’ That was really what was going to control this game, getting back in transition.”
In contrast to Thursday’s start against ABU, where UMHB went a full five minutes before gaining a two-possession lead, The Cru took control right out of the gate against Concordia. The visitors from Belton scored the game’s first eight points by the 17:29 mark, with Connor Zamiara and Donta Coady scoring four points apiece.
But then turnovers came into play, with Concordia getting to its bread-and-butter concept, forcing a live ball turnover and capitalizing with a score on the other end. In the 8-2 Tornado run that followed UMHB’s hot start, Concordia forced three turnovers, pulling within two points of the lead.
The Cru led until the 9:45 mark of the half, when CTX’s Joey Ramirez—who finished with 23 points—converted on a layup for a 16-14 advantage. UMHB tied it up three times before regaining a four-point lead in a 7-0 run, highlighted by five points from Hudson Johnson. The Round Rock native converted on a pair of free throws to put The Cru up one, then followed with a corner 3-pointer in front of the CTX bench with 3:55 left until the break.
The back-and-forth theme continued until the very end, with CTX’s Percy Green getting an open layup off a pick-and-roll with eight seconds to go, tying the score at 34 apiece heading into halftime. UMHB had led for 11 of the half’s 20 minutes while holding CTX to a 2-of-18 mark from 3-point range. But Patterson still had his concerns, namely the 14 turnovers, half of which had come on steals. Those were the sort of turnovers he knew could spell trouble for his team, because it allowed CTX to get into its transition scoring attack and push the pace.
“We knew it was going to be a fast-paced game, so all of our normal keys are different for this game based on how many possessions [we expect]. Normally we want a game to be 10 turnovers or less. For this one, we doubled that, and said if we could be under 20, we’d feel like we would have a good chance. To us, there’s a difference between a live ball turnover and a dead ball turnover. We were okay with a dead ball turnover, but the live ball turnovers usually went right into points.”
While they finished above the target max of 19, the Crusaders had four fewer turnovers in the second half as they did in the first, even as the Tornados ratched up the defensive pressure. Once again, UMHB proved its strength as a second-half team, hitting five more shots over the second 20 minutes compared to the first half (13 made FGs in H1, 18 made FGs in H2), despite taking seven fewer shots (37 FG att in H1, 32 FG att in H2).
Six lead changes came in the first five minutes of the second half, the last of which gave UMHB the lead for good on Coady’s free throw with 16:23 remaining. But CTX didn’t go away, and cut the deficit to a single point two different times leading into the 10-minute mark. Yet in each instance, Cam Stinson provided a swift counter. The Tallahassee, Florida native connected on his first 3-pointer of the afternoon with 13:47, pushing the lead to 51-47, then came back down the floor just over two minutes later and did it again, scoring from beyond the arc only 10 seconds after Jaiden Gastile pulled the hosts within one.
Starting with Stinson’s second 3, UMHB went on a game-defining 9-1 run that saw the Crusaders convert on each of their next three shots while coming up with three straight stops on the defensive end. When Hudson Johnson drove inside for a layup with 9:43 to go, The Cru had its largest lead of the day at 62-53, forcing CTX head coach Stan Bonewitz to use a 30-second timeout. But it didn’t stop UMHB’s momentum. Coady connected on a 3 for a 10-point lead just 24 seconds later.
That set up the final stretch in which the Tornados made their strong push, only to be answered by a UMHB team intent on leaving Austin with a win. The Cru closed by converting on nine of their last 13 shots while making good use of their frequent trips to the free throw line, with a 16-of-21 mark at the charity stripe over the final 10:07.
Zamiara, who had eight points in those last 10 minutes, tallied a team-best 18 points in a career-high scoring performance. The graduate student found plenty of chances at the rim as The Cru consistently broke the CTX press, and went 7-of-12 from the field. He also grabbed eight rebounds as UMHB won the battle on the boards by 20 in the Crusaders’ second-largest positive rebounding margin of the season.
Engels certainly had plenty to do with the superb rebounding effort. The senior pulled down a career-best 16 rebounds in 29 minutes on the floor, marking his fifth double-digit rebound performance of the season, with the Austin native now averaging 8.8 per game.
Building off Sunday’s win, The Cru turns its focus to Friday’s non-conference rematch in Shreveport, Louisiana, set to face Centenary (1-7, 0-1 SCAC) inside the 3,000-seat Gold Dome. UMHB won the season’s first meeting in Belton on Nov. 25, breaking a 36-36 halftime tie in an 83-62 victory.
It marks UMHB’s fourth game in the span of 10 days, with three of those on the road. That dynamic might force The Cru to put a higher priority on rest and recovery to stay fresh, but it hasn’t stopped the continued development as they push forward in this key non-conference stretch.
“We want to be more rested, because playing teams like Concordia, Arlington Baptist, Centenary, and Trinity, it wears out your legs,” Patterson said. “We have really locked in on the amount of practice time we get so we can utilize that time well. Our guys have a ton of maturity, where they can understand we might not be going live in practice, but it’s still a chance to game plan and get better.”
UMHB Stat Leaders
Points: C. Zamiara (18), H. Johnson (16), D. Coady (15)
Rebounds: Z. Engels (16), C. Zamiara (8), G. Jessen (8)
Assists: E. Lawrence (6), H. Johnson (4)
