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Show Cougars invade T-Bird territory "We could have fallen apart, be we didn't," Tom McCracken, Southern Utah State College basketball coach, says in evaluating his team's performance for the season. The Thunderbirds hit a streak of bad luck two-thirds two-thirds of the way through the season when forward-guard forward-guard Dean O'Driscoll seriously injured an ankle; Dave Knudsen, the team's leading scorer, broke his left wrist; and Jeff Skaggs developed a serious infection in-fection in his knee. It was at that time that ....... McCracken felt that the team showed its mettle. "We came back to win five of our last six games to earn a berth in the district playoff and to Southern Colorado,"' McCracken points out On the positive side, McCracken points out that: -SUSC won the Color Country Classic and lost only one home game all year. -Four of the players that were starting regularly late in the season will be back to compete next year. The four are guard Steve Hoa gland, guard Hal Welch, center-forward Norman Adams, and forward-guard Dean O'Driscoll. -The team shot well. "The final conference statistics are not in yet, but I'd guess we led the conference in free throw percentage and that we uprp rieht near the toD in finish in a fourth place tie in the conference," the coach said. Overall, SUSC won 14 games and lost 12. In the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference, the T-Birds went 10-8. "I think we did a pretty good job of coming together into a pretty good team. It's always difficult when a team has . a new coach, a bunch of transfer players, and some players back who played under a different system," McCracken says. "I'm a little disappointed that we didn't make a better run at the RMAC title. I thought that we could. Of course we beat every team in the league except one (Western New. Mexico, RMAC champion), cham-pion), and we were only really out of one game, at rebounding and field goal percentage. -"I think I learned . some things about playing on the road in the RMAC which will help us next year." Knudsen finished his season after 18 games to lead the Thunderbirds in scoring average, 17.0 points per game. Following in order are three juniors, Adams (12.1), Hoagland (11.0), and O'Driscoll (9.5). Senior Russ Ha fen was the team's top rebounder with 7.7 per game. He also averaged 9.4 points. Welch scored 8.9 on a normal night, and senior . Brett Bell averaged 8.6 points for the season. Hoagland established the SUSC assist record with 157 for the year, an average of 6.3 per game. An assist is a "pasff'that":''3'"1'-leads "pasff'that":''3'"1'-leads directly to a score." |