CSU men’s team looks to bring home success to Americus
On Monday, the Columbus State men’s basketball team travels to Americus to face Georgia Southwestern with two missions in mind: shake off the road woes and advance its position in the Peach Belt Conference standings.
The Cougars, 8-0 at home this season but losers of five of their past six games away from the friendly confines of the Lumpkin Center, will have to figure out how to win away from Columbus in order to be in a position to advance in not only the PBC postseason but the national playoff picture as well.
“We’re trying to change these guys’ mindsets,” said head coach Robert Moore. “They’ve gotten very comfortable at the Lumpkin Center. Right now, we’re trying to tell them to give more effort and energy and be enthusiastic on the road.”
The CSU offense has put up the points to be dangerous throughout the season. Their current 85.7 points-per-game average is second best in the PBC, just four tenths of a point behind conference-leading UNC Pembroke, which CSU defeated 91-88 at the Lumpkin Center on Jan. 4.
This season, the Cougars offensive attack has run through junior guard JaCori Payne. He’s fifth in the PBC with a 19.1 points-per-game average.
“JaCori leads by example,” Moore said. “He doesn’t say very much. He’s a very calm kind of player. Sometimes we tell him he needs to talk a little bit more, but as long as he’s giving us production, the other guys realize the type of leader he is, and we feel like we’re fine.
“He’s the guy who has to get going early. We try to run a lot of offensive sets through him to make sure he gets going early. He did a great job Wednesday night against Montevallo, getting others going, too. We tell him to be the Chris Paul of the team, share early, and then when he gets his offense going, to take it.”
Earlier in the season, teammate Darius Joell was neck and neck with Payne among the leading scorers for not only the Cougars but the Peach Belt. After scoring double digits in the first 14 games of the season — including a season-high 31 on the road at Flagler — Joell has a combined 36 points in his past four games.
“He’s been under the weather longer than we expected,” Moore said. “He’s been playing with flu-like symptoms for the past seven or eight days. We feel like if he gets in the gym, drinking a lot of Gatorade and water, taking care of his body, he’ll get back to the old DJ.”
The room for improvement for CSU comes on defense. The Cougars rank 12th in the 14-team Peach Belt in points allowed per game, giving up an average of 81.1. In comparison, Georgia College, which possesses the PBC’s stingiest team defense, allows only 64.4. The Cougars faced the current second-ranked defense in the conference on Wednesday, defeating a Montevallo squad that gives up an average of 69.6 points a game by a 90-76 margin.
“Even if our offense isn’t going, we feel like we can pick it up on the defensive side of the ball,” Moore said. “We’re doing more transition drills in practice, more three consecutive stops and half-court drills. We’re just emphasizing the defense in case those guys get a little down on offense.
“The stats tell we don’t have much trouble scoring, we just need to work on the defensive end. We’ve been watching a lot of film on opposing teams, trying to see what we can take away from them. We feel like we need to get more stops and do a better job of rebounding the basketball, giving each team we play one shot.”
The game against the Hurricanes on Monday comes at the right time. GSW is at the bottom of the PBC West Division standings with a 4-6 conference record and 6-11 overall record. Heading into the weekend, CSU was in a three-team logjam for third in the West with Clayton State and Montevallo.
However, a familiar face will be on the GSW bench in the form of head coach Ben Hicks, who was an assistant at CSU under Moore the past four seasons.
“We’ve got so much to lose in this ballgame,” Moore said of Monday’s matchup. “It’s almost like playing against ourselves, because he runs the same type of offense and same type of defense that I run. We have to come in with so much effort and energy that we don’t worry that he knows everything we do. We just have to execute and play with a lot of intensity.”
After Monday’s game in Americus, the upcoming week sets up nicely for the Cougars to help themselves in the standings. Home games against North Georgia on Wednesday and Young Harris on Saturday await the Cougars, with the two opponents currently ahead of CSU in the West.
“We’ve really tried to approach it game by game,” Moore said. “Right now, we’re really emphasizing on Georgia Southwestern and then we’ll move on to the next one. We’ve been going into each game like the last play is the last play of our lives, just forty minutes of playing as hard as you can. We’ve been showing a lot of videos, Ray Lewis, Muhammad Ali, just trying different things to keep these guys’ confidence up. With so many new guys, just changing things up can help, not getting stagnant about what’s going on.
“The good thing is that as a coaching staff, we agreed we’re playing our best basketball right now. We feel good about that.”
Tipoff for Wednesday’s game at the Lumpkin Center is 7:30 p.m., while Saturday’s contest will begin at 3:30 p.m.
This story was originally published January 28, 2017 at 7:34 PM with the headline "CSU men’s team looks to bring home success to Americus."