SAINT PETER, Minnesota — For much of the 2025-26 season, Mary Hardin-Baylor was the team that opponents with a halftime lead feared, as The Cru mounted numerous second-half comebacks all the way up to last Saturday’s ASC championship game win over Hardin-Simmons.
But the roles were reversed a week later on Saturday night in The Cru’s second round NCAA Tournament matchup against Gustavus Adolphus, the tournament’s No. 12 overall seed.
It was UMHB who went up big in the opening 20 minutes, leading by as many as 18 points before taking a 41-33 advantage into halftime. And it was GAC who came charging back down the stretch.
Backed by a vocal crowd and playing on its home court, GAC outscored UMHB, 57-31, in the second half, punching its ticket to the Sweet 16 in a 90-72 victory. The Crusaders were limited to a 38.5% shooting mark over the final 20 minutes while the Gusties shot 54.6% in the same stretch, moving to 27-2 overall.
“The game was basically a game of runs,” UMHB head coach Sam Patterson said. “We knew that’s what basketball is. I’m proud of how we opened the game, and got on a run of our own. We knew they would respond, especially at home with a great crowd and atmosphere. They have that quick-twitch ability to get hot quickly.”
UMHB’s memorable first season under head coach Sam Patterson drew to a close with the defeat, a 29-game campaign that saw The Cru go 21-8, capturing both the ASC regular season and ASC Tournament titles. It also featured the 13th NCAA Tournament win in program history—Friday’s 84-76 win over UW-Stevens Point—as well as the first 20-win season for UMHB since 2022-23.
In his final collegiate game, Hudson Johnson put together his 16th 20-point performance of the season, scoring a team-high 24 points as he sank five 3-pointers for the second consecutive night. Fellow senior Zach Engels had 11 points and four rebounds and Cam Stinson and Grant Jessen combined for 25 points off the bench.
But even with those solid contributions, the final numbers show missing production from two of The Cru’s biggest frontcourt pieces: forward Donta Coady and center Connor Zamiara. That proved to be a deciding factor in GAC’s second-half surge, as Coady and Zamiara saw limited action due to foul trouble, creating a void on the defensive end. Coady, an ASC All-Defensive Team honoree, picked up his fourth foul of the night just 40 seconds into the second half, and he stayed on the bench for the next nine minutes.
By that point, GAC had come back to tie the score at 61-61, and even when he checked back in, the 6-foot-5 senior had to be cautious in an effort to not foul out, limiting his defensive impact. He recorded just 16 minutes, scoring five points with one rebound after putting up 15 points in Friday’s win over Stevens Point.
Zamiara played even less, tallying a mere eight minutes before fouling out with 18:37 left in the game. Without its starting center for essentially the entire second half, UMHB struggled to keep GAC out of the paint, as 15 of the Gusties’ 18 made field goals in the second 20 minutes came in the paint, accounting for 30 of GAC’s 42 paint points on the night.
“Coming out of halftime, it was important for us to throw the first punch, and I thought Gustavus threw the first punch,” Patterson said. “I wish we would’ve had an opportunity to have Connor longer than eight minutes. Fouling out in eight minutes is pretty quick for him. So we had to make some adjustments to our lineup. Credit to Gustavus for exploiting that lineup.”
With Zamiara and Coady on the bench, GAC began its charge at the deficit right away. Myles Barnette, who came in averaging 18.5 PPG, sank two free throws after Zamiara was whistled for his fifth foul, and 52 seconds later, converted on another trip to the charity stripe, pulling the Gusties within two points of tying the score. That set off a pattern over the next several minutes in which GAC cut the lead to a single point or two before The Cru countered on the other end. With 15:14 to go, Obinna Izuora drove to the basket for a layup, bringing GAC within one point for the third time in the second half, but Cam Stinson hit a 3 moments later, stretching the lead back to two possessions.
Johnson followed Stinson’s trey with two more short-range shots of his own, pushing the lead to 56-49, but Izuora was just getting started. The junior guard finished with 26 points, going on a tear over the final 10 minutes.
Izoura almost single-handedly shifted the game in GAC’s favor after the Gusties claimed a narrow lead two different times—initially on Jake Schmitt’s 3-pointer followed by Eli Wolff’s free throws with 10:12 to go. A minute later, Izoura drove to the rim for a layup, pushing the GAC lead to 66-63. He went on to score 13 of the Gusties’ final 26 points in a game-sealing 26-9 run over the span of 7 minutes, 50 seconds late in the second half. No other GAC scorer had more than four points in that same stretch, as Izoura repeatedly challenged UMHB’s defense. From his floating jumper to counter Jessen’s wide-open 3 with six minutes left to his 3-pointer in response to Donta Coady’s 3 with 4:18 left, Izoura never let UMHB get back into it by continually extending GAC’s lead.
Between the 4:18 and 3:00 marks, he scored seven unanswered points by himself, stretching the Gustie advantage to 82-70. GAC shot 8-of-10 from the field in that closing run, while UMHB was just 3-of-11 with three turnovers in the same stretch. Johnson’s driving layup with 1:59 left was The Cru’s only made field goal in the final six minutes.
The lack of scoring paired with Izoura’s dominant run down in the final minutes made for a frustrating final 10 minutes for the visitors from Belton, and yielded a final score that did not paint an accurate picture of the game’s competitiveness for the 30 minutes that preceded GAC’s strong finish.
UMHB got out to a considerably hot start, seemingly picking up right where the Crusaders had left off on Gus Young Court in the previous night’s eight-point win over Stevens Point. Starting with Elijah Lawrence’s game-tying layup just 57 seconds into the first half, The Cru hit five of its next seven shots, led by eight points from Johnson who gave UMHB its first lead, 12-11, on a high-arcing 3-pointer from the top of the arc.
It was tight for several minutes, complete with both sides trading scores, a couple of timely blocks from Jessen on the defensive end, and three lead changes. But that changed when Cam Stinson got a go-ahead layup to fall, breaking a 19-19 tie as the clock dipped below 10 minutes. Stinson was prolific in the opening half, scoring nine of his 14 points, adding a short jumper and a 3 in the next two minutes, widening the Crusader lead to 26-20.
The Florida native provided the spark to a 22-4 run for the visitors from Belton, who connected on four 3s in that span, with another from Johnson stretching the lead to 41-23. Stinson had nine points in the spurt—the most of any Crusader—as UMHB built its largest lead of the evening.
But in a precursor to the second half, GAC closed on a 10-0 run, giving the Gusties momentum at halftime on the heels of UMHB’s own momentum burst.
UMHB’s 2025-26 season may have ended in rural Minnesota, but the season’s story was written from across the country, as The Cru put themselves in the national conversation with a win over future NWC champ Whitworth, set a scoring record at the highly-publicized D3hoops.com Classic in Las Vegas, took a Christopher Newport team that will be in next week’s Sweet 16 down to the wire in Virginia, and cut down nets in the ASC Tournament in Abilene for the first time in four years.
This was a team that accomplished a great deal, rallying around a first-year head coach who took the job in April, and meshing together in a rotation that featured transfers (Johnson, Lawrence, Jessen, Stinson) and returners (Engels, Coady, Zamiara) alike. Winning 21 games is an achievement few teams across the country accomplish in a given season. Being part of the 15.8% of Division III teams to make the NCAA Tournament is a notable feat as well. Being one of the 7.9% of teams in Division III to actually win a game in March only adds to the legacy of this group. With a senior-led team, UMHB made the most of its opportunity this winter.
“We’ve been senior-led from Day 1,” Patterson said. “I’m super proud of them. They’ve elevated this program, and left it better than they found it. What I tell all of them all the time is, ‘We’ll go as far as you’ll take us.’ We start five seniors and then we have a couple off the bench. Each of them is really unique in their skill set and their toughness. This is one of the toughest teams I’ve ever been around.”
Lawrence also spoke postgame about the journey of the season, having transferred to UMHB to reunite with Patterson, who he played for as a walk-on at Oral Roberts when Patterson was an assistant on the ORU staff. Lawrence finished as the ASC Newcomer of the Year, and tallied seven points and three assists on Saturday night.
“I thought about the journey, to start off as a walk-on at ORU, being a sponge to what [Patterson] would do on that staff,” Lawrence said. “When we reconnected, it was a no-brainer for me and my family [to come to UMHB]. Being able to come here and do what we did — conference champs, making a postseason run — obviously it didn’t end the way we wanted it to, but [Patterson] said in the locker room before we came in here that this is something we’ll remember for the rest of our lives.
“I’m thankful God allowed me to be here to make an impact. I couldn’t care less about my stats. I just cared about glorifying God and the group of guys I did it with. It means a lot.”
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