Final Stats
CHARLESTON, W.Va. – The Mountain East Conference will have a new tournament champion this year.
Fifth-seeded Glenville State eliminated last year's inaugural tournament winner, the fourth-seeded University of Charleston, 73-62, here Fridaynight in the quarterfinals of the Mountain East Conference Basketball Tournament at the Charleston Civic Center.
With the victory Glenville improved to 20-10 and earned a berth in the tournament semifinals where the Pioneers will face top-seeded and No. 4 ranked West Liberty (26-2). The Hilltoppers won both meetings between the teams during the regular season.
Glenville never trailed against Charleston, but the contest was close for much of the first 25 minutes. Then the Pioneers used a quick 7-0 spurt in a span of just 1:40 to turn an eight-point lead into a 15-point advantage with13:36 left to play. After that, Charleston was never able to get to within single digits of the Pioneers.
“I'm proud of our effort tonight,” said Glenville coach Stephen Dye, who recorded his first 20-win season with the Pioneers and ironically the first at the school since current Charleston coach Dwaine Osborne was the coach at Glenville during the 2008-09 season. “We knew we were going to have to rebound the ball tonight to beat this team and we did that. That comes down to effort. Our ability to go get the ball tonight and to get stops against them defensively was crucial.”
Glenville, which is ranked next-to-last in the MEC in rebound margin, out-rebounded Charleston 36-31 in the victory and got 10 of those boards on the offensive glass. The Pioneers also shot 46 percent from the field (23-of-50), including a 10-of-24 showing from 3-point range.
Charleston, on the other hand, struggled shooting all night. The Golden Eagles connected on just 19-of-50 field goal attempts (38 percent) and were just 9-of-29 (31 percent) on 3-pointers.
“Congratulations to Glenville,” said UC coach Dwaine Osborne. “Obviously they're a very good team. They shot the ball extremely well tonight and we didn't. All year long one of our problems has been our ability to make shots. It was a tough night for us because we didn't play as well as we would've liked.
“I think maybe we fell in love a little bit with the three early on and that kind of set the tone for us. We came out gunning and it didn't work. Stephen does a great job with his team. He has the right guys taking the right shots at the right times. Tonight we didn't. We've lost 10 games now and if you go back and look I'd say in seven or eight of those games you'd find that we shot under 40 percent.”
Donte Morales and Sedric Nady led Glenville State with 22 and 18 points respectively. The Pioneers also got 12 points from Brett Morris and eight points, eight rebounds and seven assists from Reggie Williams.
“We all hold each other accountable on our team and we wanted this game bad,” said Nady. “It was a tight game early, but we fought to get a lead. We knew they'd made a run back at us, so we just wanted to be prepared to answer that run with one of our own and we did. In the second half every time they tried to come back on us we had an answer.”
Charleston, which finished the season with a 19-10 record, got 20 points from Octavius Green, who accounted for over half of his team's made 3-pointers in the game with five himself. The Golden Eagles also got 16 points from Chris Evans and 13 points off of the bench from Vincent Dillard.