QU men’s basketball team comes up short in final exhibition at Northwestern

EVANSTON, Ill. — Quincy University men’s basketball coach Steve Hawkins was happy with the way his team battled back from a 19-point first half deficit to Northwestern.

Then came the second half.

After taking care of the basketball before halftime with only four turnovers, the Hawks had 10 turnovers in the second half and fell to the Wildcats 69-49 at Welsh-Ryan Arena in their final exhibition game of the season.

Quincy will open the regular season November 11 against Findlay in the GMAC/GLVC Crossover event in Cedarville, Ohio.

“We gave in and I wasn’t really happy about the last probably, I don’t know, maybe seven minutes or so,” Hawkins said. “You know, I felt like we didn’t give in up to that point … the kids played hard, but we’re not playing smart. We really couldn’t run the stuff that we wanted to run. You got to give Northwestern a lot of credit for that.”

Northwestern jumped out to a 28-9 lead with 12:06 left in the first half, but QU countered with an 18-5 run to cut the deficit to six before a late 3-pointer by Boo Buie gave the Wildcats a 36-27 halftime lead.

The Wildcats and Hawks traded buckets early in the second half, but Northwestern hit QU with a 12-1 run midway through the half that opened the lead to 62-40.

Malik Hardmon was the lone Hawk to hit double figures with 12 points, including going 10-for-10 from the free-throw line.

Chase Audio led five Northwestern players in double figures with 15 points. Buie added 12 points, Tydus Verhoeven and Brooks Barnhizer each scored scored 11 and Robbie Beran finished with 10 points. QU struggled shooting for the second straight game, hitting at nearly the same 31 percent clip it shot in last week’s loss exhibition loss to Illinois.

And while the Hawks hit the glass a little better Wednesday night than they did against Illinois — Northwestern narrowly outrebounded QU 39-33 — Hawkins said they should’ve done even better.

“We should have been plus in getting the rebounds,” Hawkins said. “I thought we gave into fatigue a little bit. We got a long ways to go. We’ve got to be more mentally tough than what we were tonight.”