Peaking at Right Time, Postseason Run in Sight for Eureka

EUREKA – Heading into the St. Louis Intercollegiate Athletic Conference Tournament, no one is playing better than the Eureka men's basketball team.

The Red Devils are coming into tournament week riding a six-game winning streak – the team's first since the 2012-13 season.

"We can still play better," 16th-year head coach Chip Wilde said, "but we are playing well. We've got a nice rhythm and momentum going, and that is one of our goals that we talk about – 'play our best basketball in February.' That's where we're at.

"We are trying to finish it as strong as we can."

On Wednesday, the third-seeded Red Devils (11-14, 9-5 SLIAC) will look to carry it into the postseason. At 7 p.m., they'll take on sixth-seeded Greenville (7-18, 6-8 SLIAC) in a SLIAC Tournament quarterfinal matchup inside Christine Bonati Bollwinkle Arena and Convocation Center.

The team has come a long way in a short period of time.

The Red Devils lost nine of their first 11 games of the regular season, and after starting conference play with three consecutive wins, they dropped five in a row in mid-January.

At the beginning of the month, the maroon and gold had a lot of work to do to get back in the conference race, but the team grinded out one victory after another.

It started at home with a pair of 85-69 wins over Blackburn and Westminster – two teams Eureka previously beat at the beginning of conference play. After that, the Red Devils went on the road for a rematch against a team that nipped them on their home court: Webster.

This time around, Eureka controlled the game and weathered a late comeback by the Gorloks to come away with a 75-67 victory. The team then returned home for a pair of overtime thrillers, edging Fontbonne 84-75 and Principia 78-72, respectively, before wrapping up the regular season with a 76-68 win at Spalding.

They're now one of three teams in the six-team field that has beat every squad in the conference this season at least once.

"I think that a lot of things changed," Wilde said. "Probably the biggest thing is, success breeds confidence; confidence breeds success. I think that once we got going in the right direction, they kept feeding off that."

Eureka enters the tournament as the second-leading scoring team in the league with 77.7 points per game while shooting a 45.4 percent from the field (third) and a conference-leading 74.2 percent from the free-throw line.

At 6-foot-10, junior big man Cody Baer has been one of the toughest players to stop in the league. He leads the SLIAC in rebounds per game with 11.7, ranks second in scoring with 17.7 points per game and is third in field-goal percentage at 54.2 percent.

He is one of four Red Devils to average double figures, with semester transfer guard Peewee Brown following at 16.6 points per game. Senior guard Austyn Ellison posts 14.2 points per game and is second in the league in assists per game with 4.8, while senior center Logan Dorethy contributes 12.7 points and is sixth in the league in rebounding at 7.4 boards per game.

In addition, junior guard Noah Persich is fourth in the SLIAC in 3-point shooting at 40.3 percent and contributes 8.7 points per game.

Greenville has dropped its past two games, but it has won six of its past 10 games. The Panthers' fast-paced, high-volume-shooting System remains dangerous in the SLIAC, if not as potent as it has been in other years.

As they did when they came to town in early January to start the SLIAC season, the Panthers lead NCAA Division III in scoring with 102.6 points per game. They remain second in the nation with 15.3 3-pointers made per game and third with 46.6 attempted per game.

Defensively, they have risen to fourth in the nation in turnovers forced per game with 22.4.

Senior Keishun Thomas averages a team-high 15.7 points and 3.2 3-pointers per game while playing 19.3 minutes per game. Fellow senior Jared Johnson follows with 14.8 points per game, while sophomore Carlos Crespo adds 10.8 points per game and juniors Darius Scott and Travis Dickey each contribute 10.1. The Panthers have 13 players who log between 11 and 20 minutes per game.

Eureka has faced Greenville on two very different days. In the first meeting, the Red Devils led by as many as 30 and won by 11. Greenville shot 12-for-41 from distance. In late January, the Panthers drained 21 3-pointers and held off the Red Devils by eight points despite a 43-point, 23-rebound performance by Baer.

 "I think that shooting the ball is always the key for Greenville," Wilde said. "They're always going to shoot it a little bit better at home. We still gave ourselves a chance to win at their place, but I think they made 21 3s – that's hard to overcome."

Greenville's 124-116 win over Eureka on Jan. 28 was the last time the Red Devils lost.

To get to this point, the team has overcome its share of challenges.

"We've been through adversity with scheduling and through injuries and slumps and things like that," Wilde said. "I think it's a lot of credit to our guys that they have hung with it, and they've put together a nice little run here.

"A lot of credit goes to them for staying with it, staying the course and making it through some of those tough times."

Now, the Red Devils are ready to see what they can achieve on the other side.