Box Score Despite leading by double digits in the second half, the Kentucky Wesleyan men's basketball team fell victim to a late Trevecca Nazarene push before falling 73-72 in a conference matchup Monday night in Nashville.
After Trevecca chipped away at the deficit, a jump shot by Jermaine Morgan pushed the No. 18 Panthers ahead 68-62 with 4:30 left in the game. However, the Trojans responded with an 11-4 run to close the game, capped off by Tyrell Corlew's layup that gave Trevecca a one-point lead with 1:15 remaining. KWC was unable to answer from there.
The game was originally slated for the Owensboro Sportscenter during the weekend, but poor weather conditions postponed the matchup to Monday. Due to a high school game already scheduled at the Sportscenter, the Panthers opted to travel to Nashville instead.
"I knew it wasn't going to be top notch, but I thought as the game progressed that we would get better and better," KWC coach Happy Osborne said. "We needed to be humbled, probably, a little bit. We can shake our heads and we can do whatever, but at the end of the day, anything good is hard, and now it's where it needs to be hard.
"Coaching 101 says don't come down here, put it off, make them come to you first. Maybe that was the plan, but there's a day and a time when you've got to go on the road and you've got to do hard things."
Instead of winning their seventh game in a row, Osborne said the Panthers (15-3, 3-1 in G-MAC) were "outworked."
Corlew finished with a game-best 21 points for the Trojans (7-11, 2-1), while Mac Walden and Matt Gamberoni scored 14 points each. Gamberoni also hauled in nine rebounds, including several crucial boards down the stretch.
"Gamberoni kicked our tails in the last three minutes," Osborne said. "He got every rebound in the last three minutes."
The Panthers shot 48.2 percent from the field and made 6-of-15 attempts from 3-point range (40 percent), but Osborne attributed the loss to his team's defense in the second half.
"We are a good team when we guard, but 59 percent is not guarding," he said. "We got what we asked for. Now, you bounce back, and that's all we can do."
The Trojans finished at a 53.8-percent clip for the contest, and they converted 7-of-22 from long range (31.8 percent).
Despite the postponements and eventual change of venue, Osborne refused to shift the blame elsewhere as his team looks to regroup ahead of Thursday's home game against league foe Salem International.
"All the snow, all that — Trevecca had that, too," he said. "No excuses. We came down here with a chance to put a nail in somebody's coffin, and we got slapped. Now where do we go? That's up to us."
