MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — The Southern Vermont College men's basketball team got back to regular season action Monday night, falling 92-74 at Middlebury College in non-conference play at Pepin Gymnasium.
The Panthers took a 55-32 lead into halftime and were able to hold off SVC in the second period to snap the Mountaineers' seven-game winning streak. Southern Vermont drops to 8-3 overall on the year with the defeat.
The Mountaineers are back at it on Saturday as they host Mitchell College for a 3 p.m. New England Collegiate Conference contest, going into the weekend with a 2-0 mark in league play.
SVC senior DeShawn Hamlet (Hartford, Conn.) led the team with 20 points, adding five rebounds to his line. Classmate Casey Hall (Albany, N.Y.) followed with 12 points and a team-and-season-best 10 rebounds for his first double-double of the year while notching two assists and two steals.
Mountaineer junior Nate Goldsmith (Capitol Heights, Md.) also recorded 12 points to go with his six boards in 18 minutes of reserve time. Fellow junior Rayshawn Taylor (Silver Spring, Md.) dropped 10 points and nine rebounds off the Southern Vermont bench while freshman Josh Borders (Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.) registered eight points with the start.
SVC went 23-70 (32.9 percent) from field goal range as the Panthers connected on 34-74 (45.9 percent) of its shots from the floor. Middlebury also went 10-18 (55.6 percent) from beyond the arc while Southern Vermont was just 6-22 (27.3 percent) on three-point attempts. MC took a slim 52-49 advantage on the glass and outscored the Mountaineers 16-8 in points off turnovers. Middlebury notched 46 points in the paint to SVC's 28 while the hosts' bench outscored that of Southern Vermont by a 32-26 margin.
The Panthers scored the first points of the game after grabbing the opening tip, but Hamlet came back with two straight baskets from down low to give SVC the upper hand. Borders and Hamlet then knocked down back-to-back threes for a 10-4 Mountaineer edge, and Southern Vermont continued to stay in front over the next four minutes. That's when Middlebury went on a 17-1 run through the 9:20 mark for a sizable advantage, two baskets from outside the perimeter helping MC go on top 28-16.
Hall and Hamlet scored consecutive baskets to make it an eight-point Panther lead, but the hosts continued to connect on field goals and shots from the charity stripe to increase their advantage. Six straight MC points put Middlebury up 47-26 with 2:38 to go in the half, and a Panther layup just before the buzzer sent SVC into the intermission down 55-32.
Scoring went back-and-forth in the early portion of the second half, a Middlebury layup making it a 62-41 ballgame with 16:05 on the clock. A pair of Taylor free throws started a 7-0 Mountaineer spurt that cut their deficit to 14, but the Panthers then notched 12 of the game's next 14 points for a 74-50 lead. Three-pointers by SVC senior William Bromirski (Cambridge, N.Y.) and Goldsmith made it 80-62 in favor of MC, and six unanswered Mountaineer points soon-after set the score at 84-70 with 3:19 to go. Middlebury scored its next five points from the free throw line to prevent SVC from maintaining momentum for a comeback, closing out the win with a late three-pointer for the comfortable victory.