Hot shooting Dordt sinks Bulldogs
SIOUX CENTER, Iowa – A big second-half run put host Dordt in control and helped boost the Defenders to a 100-79 win over the Concordia University men’s basketball team on Saturday afternoon. Despite shooting 51.9 percent, the Bulldogs fell on the road for the first time in conference action.
Second-year head coach Ben Limback’s squad dropped to 5-6 overall and 2-4 in GPAC play.
Dordt (9-4, 2-3 GPAC) used a two-man wrecking crew of Nathan Rindels and Tyler Wolterstorff to hand Concordia its second-straight defeat. Rindels went off for a career high 30 points on 9-for-11 shooting from the field. Wolterstorff followed closely behind with 28 points. They powered a Dordt offense that shot a blistering 57.1 percent from the field.
“We didn’t have an answer for them,” Limback said. “They really took it to us. We didn’t execute defensively and didn’t move our feet well enough. There were times we bailed them out with fouls. We just couldn’t stop those two guys.”
The Bulldogs led by as many as five points after a Robby Thomas bucket in the lane at the 7:40 mark of the first half. Then the Defenders turned the game around with a late first-half spurt and led 41-38 at halftime. Dordt pulled away after the break, turning a modest 62-56 lead midway through the second half into a 77-59 advantage by way of a 15-3 run. The combo of Rindels and Wolterstorff scored all but four puts during the spurt that essentially put the game to rest.
“I liked the way we competed for most of the game,” Limback said. “We just came unraveled for about a five-minute stretch where it got away from us. We had some costly turnovers and missed free throws and it went from a six or seven-point deficit to 14-15 real quick. They were too good offensively for us to come back from that.”
Making his first start of the season, sophomore Eli Ziegler sparked the Bulldogs in the opening 20 minutes with his marksmanship from the outside. The sharpshooter made 3 of 4 attempts from long range in the first half, but missed his only 3-point attempt of the second half.
Foul troubles were also a factor for Concordia. Folkerts picked up his fourth foul with 11:30 left and Micah Kohlwey fouled out with 8:34 showing on the clock. Less than five minutes later, Haywood joined Kohlwey on the bench with five fouls.
Robby Thomas led the Bulldogs with 16 points. He also added a pair of rejections to push his career block total to 100. Joining Thomas in double figures in scoring were Haywood (15 points) and Folkerts (14 points and seven rebounds).
The Defenders, now 4-1 at home this season, drained 32 of 56 attempts from the field and shot 75.7 percent (28-for-37) from the free throw line. Four individuals recorded double figure scoring totals for a Dordt team that has reached the 100-point mark three times this season and entered the afternoon ranked 16th nationally in scoring (87.2).
Concordia had hoped to win at Dordt for the first time since the 2009-10 season.
The Bulldogs return to action on Wednesday (Dec. 10) when they head east to take on Nebraska Wesleyan (2-5, 0-3 GPAC) in Lincoln at 8 p.m. The Prairie Wolves have won each of the last three meetings with Concordia.