MISHAWAKA, Ind. — Ryan Mansbarger and Austin Branagan each canned 5 3-pointers as part of a trio of 20-point performances for Goshen College on Saturday afternoon, but the Maple Leaf men's basketball team couldn't climb out of its early hole in a 91-84 loss to 19th-ranked Bethel University in a Crossroads League contest at the Wiekamp Athletic Center.
Mansbarger scored 25 points, Branagan added 23 and Tahj Curry scored 21 off the bench for Goshen (3-15, 1-9). All three men also tied for the team lead with 5 rebounds while Curry had a game-high 9 assists. Robert Sanders led the team with 3 steals.
TreVion Crews scored 18 points in the first half and 33 for the game to lead all scorers for the Pilots (15-3, 7-1). He went 12-of-12 at the free-throw line in addition to 9-of-14 shooting from the floor with 3 triples. Garrett Suedekum led Bethel with four threes on his way to 20 points, 10 rebounds and 6 assists, leading the team in the latter two categories.
The Pilots shot better than 50 percent from the floor in both major categories in the first half, going 12-for-23 on 2-point shots and 5-for-9 on 3-pointers, and sank 20 of their 21 free-throw attempts for the game.
Goshen kept pace early, trailing 12-10 after five minutes and 21-19 after a Branagan triple with 9:48 left, but the hosts held the visitors off the scoreboard for a 17-0 run that lasted almost five minutes. Branagan scored 7 points in the last 5 minutes of the half to make it 47-31 BU at intermission.
Bethel pushed the lead back to 18 points on three occasions in the second half, but an 8-2 Maple Leaf run behind 5 points from Mansbarger showed that Goshen wasn't going down without a fight. Another 9-0 spurt closed the deficit to 72-64 with 6:14 remaining.
The Maple Leafs got within six points on a Branagan score in the paint with 2:11 left, but could get no closer: on each of the three occasions where the visitors got within two possessions, the hosts retaliated on their next trip down the floor. Bethel went 6-for-6 at the foul line in the last 80 seconds.
Curry and Kedrick Bibby played a game-high 37 minutes for Goshen, which used seven players. GC scored 53 points in the second half behind 56 percent shooting (20-for-36) and 9 3-pointers, but made just half of its 8 free throws and still allowed Bethel to shoot 44 percent.
The victory allowed Bethel to level the score in the U.S. Highway 20 Cup rivalry series, with each school holding 3¼ points this year as of the end of the game; that tie lasted only a few minutes, though, as Goshen retook the lead when the women's basketball game finished at GC.
The Maple Leafs are idle Wednesday on a conference-wide open date that is being used to make up postponed games; GC does not have any outstanding postponements in need of being rescheduled. The team will return to action Saturday at Saint Francis at 1 p.m.
