By FHSU SPORTS INFORMATION<\/b><\/p>\n
EMPORIA, Kan. – Fort Hays State rained down a barrage of 3-point field goals on Emporia State Wednesday night (Jan. 16) at White Auditorium. The Tigers hit 17 three-point field goals, including 10 in the second half, to erase a 13-point halftime deficit and win by 11, 82-71. Fort Hays State swept the regular season series with Emporia State with the win and moved to 12-4 overall, 6-1 in the MIAA with the win. Fort Hays State also extended its win streak over Emporia State to five games.<\/p>\n
It looked like it might be a long night for the Tigers, who fell down by 13 points at halftime, 39-26, to a Hornet team that shot the ball really well early. However, the roles reversed quickly as the Tigers blitzed the Hornets with a 17-4 run to open the second half. The Hornets stopped that run with a quick 4-0 burst, but the Tigers continued their charge with a 9-0 run to take a 52-47 lead with 12:30 to play.<\/p>\n
The Hornets cut the lead back to three two times before the Tigers went on an 11-2 run to push their lead to 12, 65-53, capped by back-to-back three-point field goals from Jared Vitztum<\/a>. At that point, he was 6-of-6 from beyond the arc for the night and nearly went perfect as he missed only one attempt later. It accounted for all 18 of Vitztum’s points in the game. At that point, Fort Hays State had gone on a 39-14 run over nearly the first 12 minutes of the second half.<\/p>\n Malik Hluchoweckyj tried valiantly to keep the Hornets in the game by scoring eight points in a 10-2 run by ESU to cut the lead back to four points twice. However, Brady Werth’s<\/a> layup at 6:02 remaining and his dunk at 3:45 remaining kept the Hornets from creeping any closer.<\/p>\n Emporia State cut the lead back to four once more with a Julius Jackson layup, but then Aaron Nicholson<\/a> drilled his sixth three-point field goal of the game with 3:11 to play to push the lead to seven. He provided the no-doubt dagger with 1:26 remaining, his seventh three-pointer, to give him a new career high of 24 points. A nine-point lead was too much for the Hornets to overcome from that point. Marcus Cooper<\/a> added one more three for good measure inside 40 seconds to play, the team’s 10th<\/sup> of the second half. FHSU put on a shooting clinic in the second half, 70 percent from the field (21-of-30) and 66.7 percent beyond the three-point arc (10-of-15), after just 37.5 percent shooting overall in the first half. The Tigers finished at 55.6 percent shooting overall for the game and 58.6 percent (17-of-29) from beyond the arc.<\/p>\n Aside from Nicholson’s 24 and Viztum’s 18, combining for 13 of the team’s 17 three-pointers, Werth poured in 19 points for the Tigers on a very efficient 9-of-11 effort from the field. He made his only three-point field goal attempt of the game. Cooper also reached double figures in scoring with 10 points.<\/p>\n Emporia State shot very well overall for the game, 55.8 percent from the field, but could not match the Tigers’ effort beyond the three-point arc. The Hornets went just 2-of-10 beyond the three-point line in the second half after hitting 6-of-12 attempts from deep in the first half. Justin Washington led the scoring effort for ESU with 19 points, followed by Hluchoweckyj with 16 points.<\/p>\n Fort Hays State remains in second place in the MIAA standings and will head to Topeka on Saturday for a showdown with Washburn. The Tigers and Ichabods both have only one loss in MIAA play so far this year, FHSU at 6-1 and Washburn at 5-1. Washburn enters the game at 12-3 overall. Tipoff is set for 3 pm at Lee Arena. The game can be seen live on the NCAA Division II and Fort Hays State Facebook pages, and the NCAA Division II Twitter account.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By FHSU SPORTS INFORMATION EMPORIA, Kan. – Fort Hays State rained down a barrage of 3-point field goals on Emporia State Wednesday night (Jan. 16)… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43219,"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":[3394,7349],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mens-basketball-sports","category-sports"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/tigermedianet.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/AaronNicholson.jpg?fit=300%2C169&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43217","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43217"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43220,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43217\/revisions\/43220"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/43219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}