ETSU escapes Western Carolina to play for SoCon championship

By Jordan Ferrell (@FerrellonFM983)

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Semifinal Sunday in the Southern Conference tournament.

Two games. Four hungry teams. The hopes of accomplishing the goal of a whole season’s worth of work just two wins away. 

The atmosphere in Harrah’s Cherokee Center Asheville was electric with fans packing both sides and both decks of the arena awaiting the tipoff between two teams that are both within an hour of the city, top seed East Tennessee State and Western Carolina. 

Western Carolina’s road to the semis required winning an emotional thriller over Mercer in the late quarterfinal game Saturday night. Tidjiane Dioumassi’s 21 points and Samuel Dada’s 14 rebounds helped to propel the Catamounts to a 77-73 victory, their seventh in a row. 

“This team I have coached here this year is super special,” said Western Carolina head coach Tim Craft. “We have some of the best leadership I have ever been around in all my years as a head coach or an assistant. I am really thankful and blessed to be able to coach them. We won seven in a row and felt like we could beat anybody in the league coming down the stretch. We had Cord (Stansberry) and seven or eight guys come back from last year’s team that won four league games. They trusted in us and believed we could build something.”

The upset-minded Western Carolina fans got even more bright eyed in the first moments of the game as the Catamounts took the opening tip and started the scoring almost immediately on a Tahlan Pettway three from the left side of the top of the key. 

That translated to a 5-0 run when Cord Stansberry took a bad pass and put up a layup. East Tennessee State would not find the scoreboard until the 17:30 mark, when Jordan McCullum swished a triple from the right corner, sparking a personal 5-0 run to bring the game to a deadlock at the first media timeout. 

Following a Stansberry three from the left wing, ETSU was forced to burn a timeout. At the time, the Buccaneers were trailing 29-17. That skid turned into a full-blown free fall, going 0-for-6 from the field in that stretch. Western Carolina took full advantage, upping the ante to 31-17 at the final timeout of the first half. 

By the time the buzzer sounded, though the Buccaneers had broken the scoreless streak, they ended the half having gone over seven minutes without a field goal – at one point 0-for-11 before a couple of free throws from Blake Barkley. At the intermission, the Catamounts held a 38-24 edge. 

The second stanza began with the Catamounts going on a 5-0 spurt behind a three from Pettway and a layup from Stansberry. But, the Bucs answered with one of their own, a personal 5-0 run by McCullum. That set the tone for a back-and-forth affair in which Western Carolina held a 10-point lead that continued to stand through the 12-minute media timeout, when the boat rocked back toward ETSU. 

ETSU took advantage of an 0-for-5 Catamount stretch to pull back within seven. That deficit would continue to shrink when the Catamounts went nearly six minutes without a basket ahead of the final media timeout, where they clung to a 63-57 advantage. Out of the timeout, Western Carolina got two free throws from Stansberry that were answered on the other end by a Barkley midrange jumper, who also later hit a pair from the stripe to pull the game within four points.

Barkley continued to be the man of the hour for the Bucs while the WCU slide continued. On the ensuing inbound from the Catamounts, a traveling call gave the ball right back to the Bucs, who would score on a second chance layup from Barkley to cut the lead to 67-65. He put the exclamation point on a personal 11-0 run with a game-tying layup, also adding the and-1 with 38 seconds left on the clock to give the Bucs their first lead of the day. 

“I kind of blacked out,” said Barkley of his hot streak. “Coach (Brooks Savage) was calling plays for me. He has a lot of trust in me. My teammates have a lot of faith in me. Jaylen (Smith) had it going, and (Brian Taylor) had it going. They could have tried to do something themselves, but they had a lot of trust in me to go down and make the play. The same way I have a lot of faith. I always have trust in God and everything works out.” 

The Catamount faithful’s hopes of an upset came down to one last desperation heave that glanced off the rim, putting Western Carolina without a single field goal for almost the last nine minutes of the contest as the Buccaneers overcame, survived, and advanced to the SoCon championship Monday.

“Credit to Western Carolina, they have been playing their tails off,” said ETSU Head Coach Brooks Savage. “Coming in having won seven in a row is hard to do. I have a lot of admiration and respect for Coach Craft and his teams. They play hard and always have. He is a good ball coach, and we knew with the finish they have had to the season that this would not be easy. I thought they were really physical, but did not match up with us in terms of us not being able to outphysical them. We get the best of each other from a physicality standpoint.”

“I thought we did a great job in transition defense, which hurt us in the first couple of games. We didn’t get crushed on the offensive glass and they are one of the best in the country in that category. We hung in there, got it going and made a few more plays than they did.” 

The two sides matched up three times this season, with the Bucs dropping the series. In fact, prior to Sunday’s tilt, Western Carolina had won nine of the last ten meetings. But, that comparison to baseball is exactly how Savage put the game in a nutshell. 

“It was like one of those ‘how can you not be romantic about baseball?’ things,” he said. “They made a couple of plays in the regular season. We made a couple today. That is kind of how it goes and this was a really fitting ending to what was a really exciting three game series between us. We are fortunate to get the win.”

“Our guys were tough as nails, played to our identity, played extremely hard, especially in the second half. We cut it close a couple of times, missed our moment, but we just hung in there and threw the last punch.” 

The one thing people will look at as the story of this game is the lack of scoring down the stretch by Western Carolina, but to just focus on that would be a discredit to the effort shown by the Bucs down the stretch. 

“We just dug our heels in,” said Savage. “We showed a video the other day of all the preseason conditioning: Running the hills, crawling in the grass at 6 a.m., making the mile, which if you don’t, you have to keep running until you do. All of that builds your armor and toughness. All of that builds your collective armor as a team. All of the edge in practice, the demands and expectations, all the toughness and grit showed up when we needed it the most. These guys are resilient. They dug their heels in, guarded the ball, tried not to foul as much, kept the floor really tight. We stayed the course and we wanted them to have to beat us from three. They were 2-for-14 from there in the second half and that was one basket short of being good enough.”

“East Tennessee State was just desperate,” said Craft of the late swing. “They were first in the league in defensive efficiency. They did a good job guarding us and turned us over a bit in the press. We got good opportunities that just did not go down. It was our worst half in the last three or four weeks offensively. I certainly credit ETSU’s defense. But I don’t think it was any one thing. We made some great plays, but just did not capitalize on our opportunities.” 

The Bucs were led by Brian Taylor, who tallied 22 points, as well as Barkley, who was two rebounds shy of a double-double with 19 points and eight boards. Marcus Kell led all Western Carolina scorers with 18 points while Stansberry had 16 and Dioumassi had 14.  

East Tennessee State now awaits Furman in Monday’s SoCon championship game after the Paladins defeated UNC Greensboro.