UIndy, Bellarmine set to meet in NCAA tournament
The University of Indianapolis men’s basketball team was selected on March 10 to participate in the National Collegiate Athletic Association Tournament for the third-straight season. The Greyhounds will enter the tournament as the sixth seed of the Midwest Region and will take on the third-seeded Bellarmine University Knights.
Following the announcement, Head Men’s Basketball Coach Stan Gouard said that he was pleased that his team had made the tournament and that he looks forward to taking the next step as a program this year to advance further than one or two games.
“It’s going to be a great tournament,” Gouard said. “I’m just looking to get our guys focused on the task at hand. But it’s an awesome feeling to be here three years in a row. We’ve been, the last couple years, fighting to turn that corner, and I think it’s time to.”
This will be the third matchup between UIndy and Bellarmine this year, with the series this season currently split at one apiece. Each team that served as the away team this season has defeated the other on their home court in highly contested battles, and Gouard said this game should be another good one as well.
“I’m really excited to play those guys [Bellarmine] again because we always talk as a team, [that] ‘to get to the next step, you have to beat Bellarmine or USI [University of Southern Indiana],’” Gouard said. “But [this is a] great step for us, and I’m getting excited for the opportunity.”
Last Thursday, before the selection, UIndy dropped a close loss to the top-seeded Drury University Panthers in the 2013 Deaconess Great Lakes Valley Conference Basketball Tournament at the Ford Center in Evansville, Ind., 77-72. Although the Hounds had handed the Panthers one of their four losses earlier this season, turnovers and foul trouble for UIndy helped Drury avenge its loss.
Gouard said that the Greyhounds’ failure to put together a good start in the basketball game led to the loss.
“We just waited too late to start playing,” Gouard said. “They [Drury] had more energy to start off the basketball game, and we dug ourselves into a deep hole that was hard to get out of.”
Throughout the contest, UIndy failed to get things going, including shooting the ball. The Greyhounds finished the game shooting 37.5 percent from the field and 26.9 percent from outside the arch. From the free throw line, the Hounds shot a strong 76.7 percent in the game compared to Drury’s 66.7 percent.
Individually, three Greyhounds scored in double figures, including junior guard Reece Cheatham, with 17 points, junior forward Leland Brown, with 11, and junior guard Tyrae Robinson, who led UIndy in points with 24, including 11 free throws.
Although Robinson finished on a high note statistically, he said that UIndy’s effort at a comeback was too late, which was why the Hounds could not claim the victory.
“We just have to come mentally prepared for games like this, especially on the big stage. And we just have to stay together,” Robinson said. “We had a tough time adjusting. We kept our heads down; and in the second half, we just knew we couldn’t live on excuses.”
The Greyhounds’ road to the 2013 NCAA Championship in Atlanta, Ga., will begin against Bellarmine at 1 p.m. this Saturday, March 16, at Drury University in Springfield, Mo. The winner of the game will move on to the second round to take on the winner of the game between seventh-seeded Wayne State University (Mich.) and second-seeded USI.
