MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — Sometimes you just need a win, and you don’t care how you get it. Wednesday was one of those nights for the Morgantown boys’ basketball team.
As the No. 10 Mohigans hosted Parkersburg for Senior Night, it was far from the team’s prettiest performance of the year. But what the team needed most was a win, according to coach Dave Tallman, and in the end they defeated the Big Reds, 59-46.
“It’s a good win for us over a good opponent and I’m going to stay positive,” he said. “We beat a good team in Class AAA on Senior Night. We needed a good win over a quality opponent and we finally got one.”
Morgantown held the lead for the majority of the first half, but couldn’t seem to score consistently enough to put the game out of reach. The Big Reds — powered by a 10-point second half from Jacob McKnight — battled back to take a four-point lead with six minutes remaining.
It was only then that Morgantown seemed to find life, as they jumped out to a 14-3 run that would give them their largest lead of the game. In the end, the surge was too much for Parkersburg to overcome.
“When our backs get against the wall, and we’re down at the end of the game, the last four or five games, we’ve played hard and finished the games out,” Tallman said. “If we can put 32 minutes together, we’re going to be dangerous in tournament time.”
Senior Cam Selders, who led Morgantown with 17 points, blamed the team’s early struggles on a lack of communication.
“We just got in line and talked in the fourth quarter. In the first and second and third quarter we weren’t talking; we didn’t have any intensity,” Selders said. “Once we hit that fourth quarter, we started telling each other, ‘We gotta go, we gotta get it together and win.’ We really just stepped it up.”
Selders said that the team needs to improve on its effort level both in the pregame and the first half of play if they want to be a threat. If they can play harder to start games, he believes it’ll be easier to close them in the end.
“We just have to stay the track for the most part. We have to have more intensity. In warm-ups, we have to go harder, and right out of the gate we have to give it all we got. We can’t wait until the third or fourth quarter to start going,” Selders said. “We have to do our best in the first or second quarter, because if we smack them in the mouth early, we won’t have to worry about going extra hard in the third and fourth. We’ll already be up.”
