No. 11 Trailblazers outlast late comeback by D-II No.5 Henry to extend winning streak

VINCENNES, Ind. – The Vincennes University Trailblazer men’s basketball team jumped up 12 spots in the latest NJCAA Division I polls this week and were able to defend their new ranking Wednesday night at the P.E. Complex after defeating NJCAA Division II No. 5 Henry Ford College 83-80, for VU’s seventh straight victory to begin the season.

The Trailblazers got off to a slow start Wednesday night and trailed early before using an 8-0 scoring run to jump ahead 12-8.

VU would grow their lead to nine before Henry Ford rallied back to take the lead back with a 12-0 scoring run.

The Blazers would answer late in the first half and close out the opening 20 minutes of play on a 9-0 scoring run to take a 41-38 lead into the locker room.

Vincennes quickly expanded their lead early in the second half back to nine before the visiting Hawks cut the deficit back to three.

VU used a 12-0 scoring run to take their biggest lead of the night at 72-55 with 5:39 left to play.

Henry Ford then shifted into another gear, slowly chipping away at the deficit until the Hawks followed a three-point make with a steal and a layup on the inbounds pass to cut the VU lead down to three with under a minute to play.

Vincennes would manage to hold on late at the free throw line as the Trailblazers picked up their seventh straight win to start the season with an 83-80 win over Henry Ford.

“Henry Ford was a good team and they played us tough,” VU Hall of Fame Head Coach Todd Franklin said. “We were able to win by three tonight because we were up 17 and then we quit playing. We had the game won. All we had to do was be tough-minded enough to get it finished, but we weren’t that type of tough-minded all night and yet we still found a way to be up by 17. But I never felt like we were locked-in like we have been.”

“Then we just let Henry Ford be the total aggressor down the stretch,” Franklin added. “We let them get the ball to the middle of the lane and get to the glass. We were soft to the ball. We shot a terrible shot with two minutes to go when we were up 10. Missed a layup off the bottom of the rim, which we did repeatedly tonight. It was just a lot of soft. Then when the game got turned, we weren’t tough enough to grit our teeth and stop it.”

“Some of it is just stopping the ball,” Franklin said. “Then you have to get on the glass. They missed enough shots, but we just didn’t clean it off the glass. I don’t think we cut very hard for the ball. I didn’t think it was that hard to get the ball in and make the plays, we kind of played into it.”

“That’s on me,” Franklin added. “Because I knew the intensity level that we needed. I tried to coach it during the game, unfortunately, because I’m coaching intensity instead of strategy and that has got to change. That can’t happen again. But if it does happen again, we’ll probably take a loss. We don’t have easy games. Every game is a real game. We don’t have the ability to say, ‘well we’ll just be that tonight and we won’t know it because the other team can’t play with us’.”

“If you want to be special then it can’t be what it was tonight, you have to be stronger than that,” Franklin said. “If you are not, then you are not going to be special. If you are playing at Vincennes and you are trying to do what we are trying to do, then we have to put that on display. If somebody beats us that way, that’s fine. If you lose a game going to war, focused and intense, you still don’t like it, but you can live with it. Tonight, for the first time for a complete game, we were not the tougher team. I thought in the second half there was a stretch where they looked ready to go and in that stretch, we kept getting the lead, but we weren’t really locked in. Had we been, we could have put them all the way out. But we weren’t.”

“No disrespect to Henry Ford, they have got a really good team, they are going to have a lot of success at their level. They have played very well in our district and they play very well against a lot of Division I teams,” Franklin added. “But there is no reason that tonight we didn’t win this game by 15 plus. There is no reason other than we weren’t tough-minded enough, focused enough or intense enough and physical enough. That’s not our basketball family. You don’t get to do that here and we did. So now we’ve done it once. We did it for 25 minutes against Macomb. Now we have to break that habit, that can’t happen anymore. I’m going to try and address that in the next couple of days. I’m going to try to coach that up better so I don’t have to coach it Saturday night during the game. We are going to coach it tomorrow and Friday and then we will play the people who show me that they want to make sure they don’t display that again. I don’t think that is too much to ask. It’s a good win tonight, because Henry Ford is a good team. But it wasn’t a good performance.”

The Blazers were led offensively by sophomore Caleb Johnson (N. Preston, Nova Scotia) who picked up 14 of his team-leading 19 points in the second half, while also adding five rebounds and a pair of steals.