If you ate a bunch of marshmallows for breakfast, you probably wouldn’t have a very good start to your day.
They threw marshmallows on the floor Tuesday night at Murchison Gym, and the Westmont men’s basketball team got off to an awful start, dropping a 68-62 decision to rival Biola.
The tradition at Westmont is for the student section to throw something on the court after the Warriors score their first points against Biola. Evan Haines hit a hook shot on Westmont’s second possession, and hundreds of marshmallows came flying out of the stands.
The mess was quickly cleaned up and play resumed, but the Eagles hit both free throws on the technical foul and proceeded to play like they’d eaten their Wheaties, jumping out to a 23-8 lead.
“We let them get on a big run early and just got down in a hole,” said senior Tyler Dutton, who finished with 10 points and four rebounds. “When you’re down that big and you’ve got to come back it’s hard to get over that hump.”
While traditions deserve some respect, it’s worth noting that the Biola lead was cut down to three points at one juncture in the second half, making those two freebies at the start much more meaningful. Haines committed a foul with 7:15 left in the game and followed it up with a late push, drawing a technical to give the Eagles four free throws and possession, which they converted for the 5-point swing, making it 52-43.
But it wasn’t the technicals alone that the loss can be placed on. Rather, it was Biola’s three-headed monster consisting of Danny Campbell, Marlon King and Rocky Hampton that did most of the damage. The trio scored 61 of Biola’s 68 points, with Campbell’s 23 coming as a big wrinkle in the Warrior game-plan.
“We were giving him wide-open shots,” said Dutton. “Marlon King’s not a very good shooter, but we were helping off on him and leaving Campbell wide open.”
Coach John Moore also pointed to the King-Campbell cross-up as a key factor.
“We left the wrong guys open at the key moments,” he said. “We wanted to leave King out there, but instead we covered him and left the most important guy, Campbell, open.”
Campbell finished with 23 points, making four of six from beyond the arc. Hampton, at 6-9 and 240 pounds, shot 8-for-9 from the floor en route to 20 points and 10 rebounds. The speedy King was an effective coast-to-coast finisher for Biola, picking up seven steals and a heap of breakaway lay-ups.
Westmont (14-11, 8-8 GSAC) got things a bit closer after the abysmal first half, heading into the locker room down 32-22. Dan Rasp hit a jumper and then slammed home a big dunk off of a Haines steal to start the second. Dutton added a 3-pointer to make it an early 7-0 run that cut the Biola lead down to 32-29.
The Eagles (19-7, 10-6 GSAC), however, seemed to extinguish Westmont’s big runs and reverse them quickly, as a triple by Campbell had the lead back up to 10 just two minutes later.
“We’d come back to three or four and then they’d build it back to seven or nine. That’s where you need to get defensive stops,” said Moore, who went on to say that he felt much better about his team’s defense after it was switched to a zone late in the second half.
Rasp finished with a team-high 15 points and Andrew Schmalbach had 11 for the Warriors, who were off-target on some close-range shots down the stretch. Blake Bender also came up short on the front end of a 1-and-1 free-throw situation with two minutes to play, when a pair of makes would have put the Warriors within two.
“This was really, really a hard one, because we were kind of aiming towards this game,” said Moore. “I thought we played much better in the second half, but we just couldn’t climb the hill.”
The Warriors have four games remaining, with three on the road including a long trip down to Point Loma on Saturday.
No marshmallows allowed on the bus.
