Photo by Luke Zayas/Backwards Hat Media
NEWPORT NEWS, Virginia — For the nation’s 16th-most efficient offense, Saturday yielded a relatively difficult shooting night, with an 8-of-31 mark from 3-point range serving as the most glaring evidence of that fact.
But UMHB (13-5) made shots when it needed them most—like Donta Coady’s corner 3 with 1:24 left—and combined with a superb defensive effort, the Crusaders earned their way into the win column inside Christopher Newport’s spacious Freeman Center.
The Cru’s 64-60 win over Salisbury (10-8) was reminsicent of its win over Ohio Northern at the end of December. Neutral court game. Lower-scoring than UMHB was used to. The first game back after a week-long layoff. That had been a well-earned—though not pretty—win at the D3hoops.com Classic in Las Vegas, one in which The Cru never entirely pulled away but did enough to stay in front when it really mattered.
Saturday’s victory unfolded in a similar way on the opening day of a crossover classic between the Coast-to-Coast Conference and the ASC. It was tied at 28 apiece at halftime, and Salisbury led by 4 with 13:42 to go. But UMHB’s 17-0 run over a five minute, 41-second stretch midway through the second half, along with a handful of timely defensive stops, lifted the visitors from Belton to their sixth out-of-state win of the season.
They may have shot a season-low 25.8% from beyond the 3-point arc, but made up for it by holding the Sea Gulls to the lowest scoring total of any Crusader opponent in 2025-26.
“We kind of survived in the first half,” UMHB head coach Sam Patterson said afterwards. “I think our depth and experience pushed us over the edge with a nice run there in the middle of the second half to get us a 13-point cushion, and we held on late.”
The Cru trailed for the first seven minutes of the second half, as Salisbury’s Churchill Bounds scored on the Sea Gulls’ first possession on an offensive rebound putback, breaking the halftime tie. UMHB faced a deficit as large as six points when Bounds—a Division I grad transfer from Wagner—threw down a dunk with 15:31 to go, but it didn’t take the Crusaders long to answer.
In a 30-second span as the clock ticked below 13 minutes, Cam Stinson hit a jumper then dished an assist to Josiah Wray for a layup, knotting the score at 40-40. Stinson made two shots in the win, and they couldn’t have come at a more crucial point, as his 3-pointer a minute later pushed UMHB in front. The Cru’s next possession ended with a shot from beyond the arc. And another swish. Grant Jessen buried a 3 of his own heading into a media timeout, giving The Cru a 46-40 advantage.
That sequence spanned all of 39 seconds, but encapsulated the two leading factors in UMHB’s fourth-straight win away from Belton: timely shot-making and impactful team defense. Stinson’s 3 came on a fast-break, just seconds after Jessen leapt up and knocked the ball away from Bounds, who had grabbed an offensive rebound for Salisbury. That sent the ball into the hands of UMHB’s Jonathan Leggett, who immediately sprinted up the court before flipping the ball to Stinson for a spot-up shot on the right wing.
On the Sea Gulls’ next possession, Zach Engels guarded Salisbury’s Aidan Camper tightly, then blocked Camper’s baseline jumpshot. The block set off another fast-break score for The Cru, with Engels finding Leggett along the sideline, who then dished the assist to Jessen.
“I thought our defense turned into some good offense for us,” Patterson said. “We forced 19 turnovers. We put in a press this last week to use when we needed it, and I thought that sparked us for a stretch. We wanted to play faster, and Salisbury did a good job, for the most part, of keeping the tempo lower. So any chance we got to speed up the game, with the press or pushing after misses, was important for us.”
The game’s biggest run was only getting started. With the momentum already in hand, Jessen gave UMHB a highlight-reel-worthy slam dunk at the 9:59 mark, as the junior guard drove hard from the right wing, then launched from his feet between two leaping Salisbury defenders. There was no stopping him as he soared towards the rim, making a statement that The Cru was in control.
UMHB made seven of its 10 field-goal attempts in the run, which culminated with Engels’ layup at the 8:36 mark after Leggett knocked down a 3. Five different Crusaders contributed scoring-wise in the five-minute stretch—a span that gave UMHB three of its eight 3s on the day—all while holding Salisbury to five consecutive missed shots and four turnovers.
“You saw the depth that we have,” Patterson added. “During that 17-0 run, we had four guys off the bench in the game. We’ve got really selfless guys who just want to win. The guys who normally are in the game during that time were the first ones standing up and cheering our guys on from the bench.”
It was a collective winning effort on Saturday eveing, with no Crusader scoring more than 15 points, though six different players had at least five. Jessen led the bench production with nine points on 4-of-6 shooting, along with four rebounds, two blocks, and two steals in 17 minutes. Patterson used 13 players in the first half alone, and with a second game in Newport News against Christopher Newport on Sunday afternoon, leaning into that depth was a necessity.
“We were just trying to get guys touches and get them out there,” Patterson noted. “It was a great game for our depth to be showcased.”
Salisbury had more depth on its side compared to recent games as well. Leading scorer Jamison Graves, who missed the Sea Gulls’ previous three contests, returned to the floor with 14 points, eight rebounds, and three assists, making a difference as Salisbury made one last push down the stretch.
Graves found Leon Elung for a 3-pointer shortly after Engels put UMHB up by 13, sparking a 13-4 Salisbury run that cut The Cru’s lead to 57-53. Graves had a jumper of his own in that span, just before Elung grabbed an offensive rebound and scored his sixth and seventh points in the spurt. Graves came up with another key assist with 1:48 to go—his third assist of the contest—dishing a pass to Bounds, who twisted around Connor Zamiara and scored off the glass, bringing Salisbury back with four again.
The Sea Gulls were unrelenting, but UMHB refused to let them pull within one possession. 24 seconds after Bounds’ layup, Hudson Johnson took a handoff from Zamiara at the top of the arc and dribbled aggressively into the lane, drawing significant defensive attention as UMHB’s season-long leading scorer. But instead of taking a shot himself, he fired a pass to Coady in the right corner. The senior connected on the 3 just a few steps in front of the Crusader bench, widening the gap to seven.
Salisbury pulled within four twicemore, first on Graves’ lone 3 of the game and later on Aidan Camper’s jumper with eight seconds left. But Johnson sandwiched a pair of free throws between those two scoring plays, keeping UMHB’s lead secure in the final 20 seconds. The Cru outscored Salisbury, 36-32, over the last 20 minutes, and that was enough to emerge with a beneficial neutral court victory.
“I think our rebounding kept us in it in the first half, and then our defense allowed us to win it,” Patterson said. “Holding them to 40 percent from the field was great. They had only 7 made 3s, and one of those was from the NBA line as the shot clock expired. To have kind of an off shooting night and still get the win is important for our guys to realize we can win in a variety of ways.”
UMHB, one of the best rebounding squads in Division III, outrebounded Salisbury, 24-21, in the first half, including a 12-7 advantage on the offensive glass. While it produced just four second-chance points, the effort to track down missed shots and extend possessions put added pressure on Salisbury’s defense, keeping The Cru in lockstep with the Sea Gulls. Salisbury shot 37.0% in the opening 20 minutes compared to UMHB’s 28.6%, but both squads finishd with the exact same number of made shots, 10.
“I thought the rebounding was huge for us [in giving us opportunities]. I just told them at halftime, ‘Just continue what you’re doing; the shots will start to fall,’” Patterson said. “I thought we took good shots for the most part, and it ended up helping us towards the end of the game when we made those big ones.”
The first half was tightly-contested, with UMHB’s lead never widening beyond two after Graves countered Engels’ game-opening 3 with one of his own at the 17:55 mark. Salisbury led by as many as six in the half, but UMHB cut that down on a 3 from Elijah Lawrence and a three-point play on a layup from Josiah Wray.
Johnson tied it for good with 1:32 left thanks to a steal from Trey Seigle on the defensive end, as neither offense managed to break the tie before halftime. It was the second-fewest points scored in the first half by one of UMHB’s D3 opponents this season, next to Ohio Northern’s 23.
The defensive performance stood out in the first half, just as it did in the second, with UMHB showing increased development on that end of the floor, even as the offense continues generating buzz. UMHB had 11 steals and three blocks in addition to holding Salisbury to its lowest shooting percentage in its last six games.
“We’re great in our preparation, and I think that’s what makes our defense stand out,” UMHB’s first-year head coach said. “Our guys are mature and they understand the other team’s personnel. Our philosophy is we don’t want the best players to beat us doing what they do well. We want to be able to take away those strengths as best we can.
“We do a deep dive analytically on every opponent and their individuals. We ask, ‘What are they shooting off the dribble and ball screens? What are they shooting off the catch? What are they shooting going left or going right?’
“Our guys are hungry for that kind of knowledge and they really lock in on the scouting reports. We have a collecition of guys who play great team defense. We don’t have an individual dominate-a-game-defensively kind of player, but we have a bunch of guys who will do whatever it takes to win.”
They did that on Saturday, and will look to do it again Sunday afternoon in a 3 p.m. CT duel against 17th-ranked Christopher Newport (15-3). The Captains held off ETBU’s upset bid on Saturday, winning 61-59, and bring a seven-game win streak into the matchup against UMHB.
The Crusaders’ 19-game non-conference slate has featured lengthy trips to Las Vegas and Washington already, and they’ve played seven true road games this season as well. Neither the travel nor the challenging road envionment will be new for Patterson’s squad going into its fourth game against a nationally-ranked opponent this season.
“We’re excited,” Patterson noted, when asked about Sunday’s contest. “That sums it up. We love the opportunity to play a great quality opponent on the road and show the country what this team is about. We’ve had great success away from Belton this year, specifically wuth these plane trips. We never want to allow our guys to make excuses, and they’re not a team that wants to make excuses. It’s a short turnaround, but our guys know what it takes and they’ve done it before.”
In Vegas, a tough shooting night on Day 1 gave way to a 104-point performance 24 hours later against No. 11 Redlands, a contest in which UMHB sank 17 3s and broke the D3hoops.com Classic record for single-game scoring. The Crusaders certainly believe they are capable of putting together a similar Day 2 performance again.
“To be honest, when you’re going into a really good opponent like this, it’d probably be harder to play them if we played a perfect game tonight,” Patterson said. “Because subconsciously you’re thinking, ‘We played great tonight, can we do it again?’ Now the mentality is, ‘We didn’t play great. We still got the win. Now we’re due to have a really good game.’ That’s a mentality that confident players like our guys have. We have a group that understands what it takes and is excited about the game tomorrow.”
UMHB Stat Leaders
Points: Zach Engels (15), Donta Coady (11), Grant Jessen (9)
Rebounds: Zach Engels (11), Connor Zamiara (9), Donta Coady (8)
Assists: Hudson Johnson (3), Elijah Lawrence (3), Jonathan Leggett (3)
Thanks for the story RIley!
Watched the game. You got it just right!