Fort Hays State men’s basketball opens the 2014-15 season in Maryville, Mo., on Friday and Saturday (Nov. 14-15) with a pair of non-conference games against schools from the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference. The Tigers take on Upper Iowa on Friday at 5 pm, then Minnesota State-Moorhead on Saturday at 1:30 pm. The games are being held at Northwest Missouri State’s Bearcat Arena.<\/p>\n
Fort Hays State, which received votes in the NABC Preseason Top 25 Poll, is coming off its eighth 20-win season under head coach Mark Johnson<\/a><\/dfn>. Johnson enters the 2014-15 campaign as the all-time leader in coaching wins at FHSU with 268. He guided FHSU to a NCAA Tournament appearance last year for the sixth time in his tenure, seeing the Tigers finish 22-8. The Tigers finished fourth in the MIAA regular season standings last year, but solid play in region helped the Tigers give the MIAA four of eight teams in the regional.<\/p>\n Craig Nicholson<\/a><\/dfn>, although he’s just a junior, has more experience in a FHSU uniform than any other Tiger on the roster this year. All of the other eight returners have not played more than one year for FHSU. Nicholson earned an All-America Honorable Mention selection from Division II Bulletin last year, averaging 17.2 points and 7.4 assists per game. He finished with 222 assists overall and sat a new school record in assists per game, averaging 7.4 per game. He also set a new FHSU record for free-throws made in a season with 190, helping Fort Hays State shoot 78.9 percent as a team at the free-throw line. The team free-throw percentage was also a new school record.<\/p>\n Tomislav Gabric<\/a><\/dfn> (8.0 ppg, 4.3 rpg) and Jake Stoppel<\/a><\/dfn> (6.1 ppg, 4.4 rpg) were starters for the Tigers last year. James Fleming<\/a><\/dfn> returns as the top scorer off the bench at 9.6 points per game. He is the top returner in 3-point field goals made with 46 last year. Also returning for the Tigers are Achoki Moikobu<\/a><\/dfn>, Jared Tadlock<\/a><\/dfn>, Nick Capiti<\/a><\/dfn>, and Drew Kite<\/a><\/dfn>. Capiti and Kite both redshirted last year.<\/p>\n The Tigers faced Upper Iowa on a neutral court in their second game last year, needing overtime to defeat the Peacocks 97-90 in their first match-up ever. Upper Iowa went on to finish 16-14 last year, but has four starters back from last year.<\/p>\n FHSU faces Minnesota State-Moorhead for the first time in history on Saturday. MSU-Moorhead was one of the teams on the bubble last year that did not get into the NCAA Central Regional. The Dragons have several pieces back from their 21-8 team last year.<\/p>\n As always, these games will be critical later in the season to region rankings, as both Upper Iowa and MSU-Moorhead are from a conference in the Tigers’ region. Northwest Missouri State will also be taking on both teams, just in reverse order of the Tigers over the two days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fort Hays State men’s basketball opens the 2014-15 season in Maryville, Mo., on Friday and Saturday (Nov. 14-15) with a pair of non-conference games against… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":142,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3394],"tags":[842,3476,3466,2373,857,756,2370,4072,4071,3474,2092,856,3628],"class_list":["post-16332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mens-basketball-sports","tag-achoki-moikobu","tag-drew-kite","tag-fhsu-mens-basketball","tag-head-coach-mark-johnson","tag-jake-stoppel","tag-james-fleming","tag-jared-tadlock","tag-maryville","tag-minnesota-state-moorhead","tag-nick-capiti","tag-northern-sun-intercollegiate-conference","tag-tomislav-gabric","tag-upper-iowa"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/142"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16332"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16445,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16332\/revisions\/16445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}