On Saturday, Jan. 31, in Northwestern’s very own Bultman center, The Red Raiders Men’s Basketball team took a devastating victory over the Doane Tigers, boasting a final score of 93-67.
The game started rough with the first points being scored 12 second into the game, via freethrow–coutesy of NW’s Jesse Van Kalsbeek. From there, The Raiders put Doane through the ringer. In the next four minutes of the game NW put up six buckets for a total of 13 points to Doane’s zero.
With that domineering display, the pace of the game was set. For every bucket The Tigers managed to scrounge out of NW’s defence, The Raiders would put up two or more. When Halftime rolled around, the gap between the two teams had grown to a whopping 37 points.
During the second half of the game, one of the Doane players appeared to suffer a rather egregious injury, slamming his fists into the ground and shrieking in pain. Though, he returned to the game not too shortly thereafter.
A member of NW’s pep band, Claire McKim, testifies that “[he] looked like he was in agony when he was hurt, but then he played again five minutes later, which confused me because he was crying about it so much.” Outraged, she continued, “We even clapped when he was walking off, just for him to come back!”
In spite of that setback, however brief, Doane was able to make progress in shortening the point disparity. However, in the end, that progress was negligible at best. They were only able to close the gap by 12 points before the final buzzer.
At the beginning of this basketball season, after six back to back wins, NW suffered a nail-biting loss on Doane’s court. The final score of that game was 71-75. After such a hiccup in the early season’s momentum, there is no doubt that the The Raiders were relieved and ecstatic to take such a definitive victory over the Tigers. Many may wonder what the difference between then and now could be. In the words of a NW Forward, Brennan Reid, “We played great as a team rather than 5 individual guys.”
