Junior center reflects on ‘pretty good’ hoops season

The author, Mohamed Sylla, is a junior center on the men’s basketball team.

Our season may have recently come to an end, but it certainly had its highlights.

One of our most impressive accomplishments as a team was only losing a single game at Calihan Hall all year.

Our goal was to finish the season with no losses at home, but unfortunately we lost the last home game of the season, on senior night, against Purdue Fort Wayne. We were down as much as 16 points in that game and staged a comeback in the second half, but ultimately lost by three points.

That loss snapped a 15-game home winning streak.

We were disappointed because we all wanted to get that win, specifically for our seniors playing their last regular season game in front of our fans, but unfortunately it didn’t happen the way we planned it.

Another part of the season that didn’t quite go as planned: the Horizon League tournament. We had hoped to win and advance to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2012 to do something special for our fans and the city of Detroit.

We opened the tournament strong with a 74-67 victory against Cleveland State at home. A few days later, we played in the quarterfinals against Northern Kentucky, the team we lost to in last year’s tournament.

We were looking for revenge, but we ended up losing to them for the second year in a row.

Even that wasn’t the real end to our season; we played in a tournament called The Basketball Classic against Florida Gulf Coast, but lost to the Eagles 95-79.

Overall, I think we had a pretty good year. Although we didn’t get to where we wanted, we will come back stronger and better next season.