Road Win at SIUE
(St. Louis, MO) – The OVC champion SEMO Redhawks didn’t want to be just ‘co-champions’ and they played like it Thursday night. A convincing 83-68 victory over Southern Illinois Edwardsville did the trick. Guards Rob Martin and Teddy Washington were unstoppable and the Redhawks earned their first-ever, outright Ohio Valley Conference men’s basketball title.
Martin scored a career-high 31 points and Washington added a career-tying 28. SIUE’s Ray’Sean Taylor scored 30 in defeat. The Cougar’s all-time leading Division 1 scorer is now three-points shy of 1,900 for his four year career.
Martin and Washington were equal to the task of squaring off with the OVC’s leading scorer. SEMO coach Brad Korn says the two guards have been great all season and it was fun to be in highly meaningful, late season game against a great opponent.
Attendance at First Community Bank Arena was 2,503 and was the largest at SIUE since 2018.
OVC Champion SEMO
Korn’s team keeps breaking new barriers. With Thursday’s win, Korn earned his first-ever twenty-win season and just the third in SEMO program history. Their 15 conference wins are tied for the most in program history and it is just the second regular season title during their D1 existence.
After seizing the 2023 OVC Tournament title, the Redhawks battled injuries and won just ten games last season. The ten-game turn around comes with the program’s first-ever ten-game, D1 winning streak. Korn says he’s proud of how his team rebounded from last season and how the program has been built on a solid foundation.
While Korn will, without a doubt be the OVC ‘Coach of the Year’, he truly appreciates the same kind of foundation that Brian Barone has built at SIUE. The Cougars (19-11) have earned three straight winning seasons and have earned their first-ever .500 (12-7) OVC record. SIUE’s only Division 1 winning seasons have come during the last three under Barone. Korn says he has huge respect for Barone and his staff.
Barone says he has great respect for Korn and that the two OVC rivals are good friends.
SIUE has another meaningful game on Saturday. Little Rock visits Edwardsville and the winner of that game will earn the second seed for next week’s OVC Tournament championship. With that second-place finish, a team earns a double-bye into the tournament’s semifinal round.
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