The Idaho men’s basketball team kicked of their first home game against a Big Sky opponent this season with a win over Northern Arizona Thursday at the Cowan Spectrum.
Sophomore Vic Sanders led the Vandals with a career-high 33 points and five rebounds in the 83-76 victory over the Lumberjacks.
“I just played the same game,” Sanders said. “My teammates did a great job getting me the ball in a position to score, and I just did what I could do to help the team win.”
“We just wanted to give him the ball as much as we could,” said Idaho sophomore Chad Sherwood. “When he’s hitting the ball like that, we just start running plays for him and try to keep it going.”
Head coach Don Verlin said Sanders played really well on both sides of the ball, pointing out that the sophomore tallied three steals and three blocks.
“Anytime you score 33 points, it’s a big night. I thought he played a solid defensive game, but he really stepped up offensively,” Verlin said. “The one thing I’ve been talking to Vic (Sanders) a lot is stepping up his game, but doing it with just a little more discipline.”
In the absence of junior guard Perrion Callandret, who is out with a foot injury, Verlin said that the entire team felt the need to fill his role.
“Anytime there’s a good player out, the other guys need to step up,” Verlin said. “We have a lot of good players in this program and I think a number of them stepped up their game.”
“(Callandret is) a big part of our offense, a big part of our team,” said Sherwood. “I was happy I could fill the void a little bit.”
Despite the loss of Callandret for the matchup, the Vandals finished the game shooting 52.7 percent from the field, while the Lumberjacks finished with 45.3 percent.
Idaho took the lead early on and maintained it throughout the game, finishing the first half with a 45-30 lead.
As the game went on, Northern Arizona seemed to find their footing and increased their shooting percentage in the field from 37.5 percent in the first half to 51.7 percent in the second.
“We kind of lost focus in the last minutes,” Sanders said. “We’re just going to have to get back to practice, come together as a team, and make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
Verlin said the team simply lost their concentration late in the matchup.
“I thought the first 35 minutes we played really good basketball. We just didn’t execute the way we were supposed to the last four or five minutes of the game,” Verlin said. “Every possession matters out there. It doesn’t matter if we are up 30 or down 30, we need to play that possession to the best of our abilities.”
Idaho hosts Southern Utah Saturday at 7:00 p.m. in the Cowan Spectrum in another Big Sky Conference game.
Mihaela Karst can be reached at [email protected]