Titans Take to Road, Don’t Pack Success

Cal State Fullerton didn’t look like a basketball team that had won five consecutive games.

But, as Saint Louis Coach Charlie Spoonhour said, “If you find one of us with a winning streak much longer than five games, you’re looking at a Duke, or a Kentucky, or somebody like that.”

The Billikens, with four starters back from a team that reached the NCAA South Regional’s second round last season, overwhelmed Fullerton with a swarming man-to-man defense, 80-46, in front of 11,672 in Kiel Center.

Goodbye, winning streak. Hello, embarrassment.

“Maybe I showed up with the wrong team,” Titan Coach Bob Hawking said. “We didn’t do anything we have been doing. We couldn’t get started, then we couldn’t get it going later on, and we didn’t finish well.”

That left little else.

To Hawking, there was only one bright spot. “Even when you get beat by more than 30 points, it’s still only one loss,” he said. “At least, they don’t give you three.”

The Titans (5-2) scored 16 points in the first half--only two points more than the school’s two worst one-half efforts since 1974--and it was never a competitive game after Saint Louis built a 17-point lead at halftime.

Ike Harmon’s 12 points turned out to be Fullerton’s best scoring effort. None of the other Titans reached double figures in a game in which Fullerton shot only 36% from the field and made three of 16 three-point shots.

Most of everything the Titans threw at the basket clanked. Fullerton made only nine of 22 free throws. And, as Hawking said, “nobody was guarding us then.”

Spoonhour was pleased his team was able to shut down the Titans so well. The Billikens also had a 39-35 rebounding advantage, the first time in five games the Titans have been outrebounded.

“We were able to force them out of the spots where they wanted to be,” Spoonhour said. “We watched Fullerton on film, and Harmon is a really good player. We wanted to make sure we had as much support as we could get when he got the ball, and we tried to make it difficult for him to get it. His fouls sort of took him out of the game too.”

Harmon picked up his third foul with three minutes left in the first half, but he went the rest of the game without getting his fourth.

“I was double-teamed a lot, and they made it tough for me to get the ball,” Harmon said. “We just have to be able to learn from the mistakes we made.”

Senior forward Ryan Luechtefeld guarded Harmon most of the game.

“I had a lot of help from other people,” Luechtefeld said. “It seemed like they were going down to the end of the shot clock a lot, which says we were doing what we needed to do.”

The Titans also were hurt by 26 turnovers.

“They were really pressuring the lanes and denying entry, and we didn’t respond very well to it,” Hawking said.

Point guard Kenroy Jarrett, who had six turnovers, said he was surprised about how aggressive the Billikens were on defense.

“The referees talked to us at the start about hand-checking, but then they let it go on, and I wasn’t prepared for that,” Jarrett said. “But we’ll come back. We’re not going to let one loss like this one hurt our good start.”

Jarrett and guard Mark Murphy each were three of eight from the floor and a combined three of 11 on three-point shots.

The Billikens (4-4) shot 47% from the field, with Luechtefeld making seven of 11 shots, most of them inside, for 14 points. Reserve Larry Simmons led Saint Louis with 16.

While Spoonhour was pleased with his team’s effort, he thought the Titans might have been affected by the quick turn-around for a Saturday game after playing Thursday night at home, particularly with a two-hour time change. The Titans departed at 5 a.m. Friday for the trip to the Midwest.