49ers move to second place in the American Conference

CHARLOTTE ATHLETICS

Dezayne Mingo scored 20 points in Charlotte's 73-70 win against Tulane in an American Conference basketball game Jan. 23 at Halton Arena. With the win, Charlotte moved to second in the conference standings.

Charlotte has vaulted to second in the American Conference basketball standings.

The 49ers (11-9, 5-2) withstood a late rally by Tulane inside Halton Arena for a 73-70 win on Friday night for their second win in a row. After scoring just 23 points in the first half, the 49ers scored 50 in the second.

“I’m really proud of the guys today,” Charlotte coach Aaron Fearne said. “[Tulane] is not an easy team to play. They're so disruptive with their zoning and pressing and changing zones and going into man [defense sets] It makes it a thinking game, which you don’t want it to be, because you want to just play. … It was a bit of a grindy game.”

After losing to Tulsa on Jan. 14, Fearne challenged his team to be tougher, especially in rebounding. In that game, Charlotte was outrebounded 35-22. Since then, they outrebounded East Carolina by 14 and Tulane by 17.

“I think tough teams win and soft teams don’t,” Fearne said. “We’ve kind of talked a lot about collisions in basketball; there are collisions everywhere. The guy goes one on one at some point we’re going to meet. There's going to be a collision. … I talk to these guys a lot about that… you have to dominate physically. It’s a mentality. … Football is obviously the biggest [physical sport]. I mean physical teams in football dominate you with the line, they dominate you with the run, they dominate you with the routes that they run. …That’s how I try to get these guys to play, to play really tough, really physical, and just try and dominate that space.”

Fearne’s message resonated with forward Ethan Butler, who came off the bench to score 10 points on 4-of-5 shooting against Tulane. He also grabbed four rebounds.

“It’s a repeated message we get every day,” Butler said, “just the importance of how it creates control of the game. It creates pressure opportunities and that’s big for us. That has been key to our success this year. And on defense, getting a big rebound and getting stops allows us to get out and run in transition and it’s big for us.”

Defensively, Charlotte played fairly sound. Tulane forward Ryan Brumbaugh had a big game with 35 points on 11-of-15 shooting, but only one other Green Wave player, Asher Woods, scored double figures with 10 points. Charlotte held Tulane to 19% shooting from 3-point range as well. 

“I thought we made it difficult for a lot of the guys tonight,” Fearne said, “like we did some pretty good things like slide our feet, sit in gaps, and follow the scout and being really continuous with our game plan a little bit the last couple of games. Someone will just do what they have to do, and we'll make it difficult for everybody else. I think it’s hard to stop everybody. It’s almost impossible to do, in this day and age.” 

The 49ers go to Temple next on Jan. 28 in the second meeting between the two this season. Temple won the first game 76-73 in Charlotte, but Fearne feels his team has grown since.

“What I’ve tried to get them to do is just play with better discipline and make less mistakes,” he said. “Offensively, we’re a pretty good team. Analytically, it says we are and we do some good stuff. … It’s just defensively we’ve got to become a little bit more disruptive. I don’t think we turn teams over enough. We’ve got to be excellent on the boards and then just defensively, it’s all right. Guarding the action is one thing, but it’s being disciplined to do the little things.”

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