By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
In basketball, as in the rest of life, you don’t always get everything you want.
But NKU Coach Darrin Horn got most of what he wanted in Thursday night’s Horizon League quarterfinal game at Truist Arena.
NKU’s Trevon Faulkner loads one up against Oakland defender Jalen Moore. (Photo by Dale Dawn)
Horn got an 81-74 win over Oakland for starters, and a return to Indianapolis for the four-team semifinals Monday and Tuesday, where grad student Trevon Faulkner will be making his fifth straight trip, just as NKU tells kids when they’re recruiting them that they can expect to go.
And where maybe, just maybe, NKU can erase the memory of last year’s championship game second-half collapse against Wright State when the Norse had an NCAA bid all but sewn up. “That’s not something we talk about,” Horn said, but getting to Indy is.
Horn got a strong performance all through the lineup, as he knows he needs from a team without a single first-team All-Horizon League selection, with five players in double figures.
Horn got the kind of perimeter shooting the smallish Norse must have with Marques Warrick, Sam Vinson and Trey Robinson, who knocked down nine of 15 three-point shots as a group for an NKU team that finished 13 of 29 from long range.
Horn got the rebounding and inside presence he needs from 6-foot-8 Chris Brandon, NKU’s only player with any size, who had a double-double with 13 points and 13 rebounds.
Horn got the ballhandling he needed from senior Xavier Rhodes, who turned it over just three times in in his 35 minutes.
Horn got the kind of game he “talks about so much with this group,” as he said, “when we get everybody playing well, we can win games.”
Horn got revenge for the homecourt regular season one-point loss to Oakland that (along with the Milwaukee loss here) might well have cost NKU a shot at the regular season Horizon title.
NKY’s Marques Warrick makes his move. (Photo by Dale Dawn)
Horn, with the victory, got a 20-win season (20-12) for his Norse, his third in four seasons in Highland Heights.
And finally, Horn got a Monday matchup (7 pm, ESPNU) with the No. 1 seed Youngstown State, who NKU split the season series with – winning 77-73 at home, losing 74-56 on the road. In what will be a doubleheader of sorts, the NKU women won their way to Indianapolis with a 59-58 road upset of Youngstown State to earn a spot in a 2:30 semifinal game against Cleveland State at Indiana Farmers Coliseum Monday.
What Horn didn’t get was the kind of large welcoming (as well as season sendoff) crowd for the return home from a seven-out-of-eight-road-game February that the Norse survived with a 4-3 record (3-1 the final two weeks).
“Quite obviously, I was disappointed with the crowd, the size of the crowd,” Horn said, although the 2,672 fans (it looked like more) made their presence known with their extremely vocal disapproval of back-to-back questionable calls against the Norse nine minutes or so left in the game. “That kind of worked our crowd up,” Horn admitted.
Vinson liked that. “The crowd was great tonight, they’re really our sixth man when you get a bad call or hit a big shot,” said the lone Northern Kentuckian starting for the Norse and the hometown guy this crowd takes its cues from.
With three steals in addition to his 12 points, Vinson, a Horizon League All Defensive Team player, got things going for NKU as they had to pull every trick they had to hold Oakland guard Jalen Moore to 21 points, although it took him 18 shots to get there.
Faulkner, named the actual Sixth Man of the Year in the Horizon League this week, as he’s been accustomed to doing after setting the NKU career record for starts, dropped in 12 points in 24:39.
Sam Vinson gets his hand on the ball defending Oakland’s Jalen Moore with help from Trey Robinson. (Photo by Dale Dawn)
And how about Marques Warrick. All the junior from Lexington did was lead NKU in scoring again, knocking down five of seven from long distance, totaling 22 points, many coming as the shot clock wound down and the bench countdown was reaching single digits.
No panic. No rushing anything. “I love those situations,” said Warrick, “that’s our mentality.”
Now the mentality is to get back on the road, back to Indy and back to the championship game and get it right this time.
“We all hated how it ended (last year),” Vinson said. “We’ve put in a lot of work to get where we are now.”
And then there’s this: It’s “our confidence in each other,” Horn said. And their confidence in Brandon playing the way he’s been as the senior’s college career winds down.
“We need him,” Horn said. “No one is more important than he is.”
BOX SCORE
OAKLAND 32 42—74
NORTHERN KENTUCKY 41 40—81
OAKLAND (13-19, 11-10): Hervey 15, Townsend 19, Watts 2, Lampman 9, Moore 21, Price 6, Conway 2, Capriotti 0, TOTAL: 74.
NORTHERN KENTUCKY (20-12, 15-8): Brandon 13, Robinson 11, Vinson 12, Warrick 22, Rhodes 5, Faulkner 12, Sumler 0, Zorgvol 0, Pivorius 6, Evans 0, TOTAL: 81.
