POMONA, Calif. - With stellar shooting from the starting five, the Cal Poly Pomona men's basketball team held off a late second-half rally from The Master's College en route to a 75-65 home win in the Broncos' season opener on Tuesday night.
CPP's five starters shot a combined 22-for-42 (52.4 percent) with
DeRonn Scott tallying a team-high 16 points while
Terrence Drisdom went an effective 7-for-13 from the field to collect 14 points of his own.
Anderson scored the Broncos' first basket of the second half and that put the senior guard's career point total at 1,000. He is 33 points shy of moving into the top 10 in program history.
Now 1-0 on the season, CPP will get a one-week break from competition before starting conference play on Wednesday, Nov. 21 with a 7:30 p.m. road game at Humboldt State. Tuesday's result marked the first loss of the season for The Master's College, a squad that competes out of the NAIA's Golden State Athletic Conference (GSAC).
The Broncos played well defensively Tuesday with 11 steals and five blocks as a team.
Mitchel Anderson recorded a team-best three blocks and
Barry Bell picked up four steals to spark the host's transition game.
The visiting Mustangs hit 10 three-pointers on 28 attempts with some of those clutch baskets helping TMC gain a lead late in the first half. CPP closed out the period on a 9-0 run that was capped off with a three-pointer from Scott. That brought the halftime score to 40-32 in favor of the Broncos.
Through the opening 10 minutes of the second half, the Mustangs steadily chipped away at the CPP advantage. A layup and subsequent free throw from Derrick Fain at the 11:17 mark brought the margin to three and just a few minutes later, a basket by Devin Dyer cut the Broncos' edge to just one.
That was as close as the Mustangs could get in the second half as Anderson knocked down a three-pointer on the next CPP possession and the hosts soon spread the gap to double digits. Through the 40 minutes of action, the Broncos limited their turnovers to single digits at eight while forcing 18 from TMC.
Freshman
Jordan Faison provided steady minutes off the bench in his CPP debut. The Lake Forest native totaled nine points, six rebounds and two assists.
Meanwhile, the Broncos' defense couldn't find much of an answer to Fain's playmaking ability. The sophomore from Dallas, Texas, netted a game-high 25 points on 10-for-17 shooting. Still, CPP managed to limit Mustangs' star senior guard Leif Karlberg to a 2-for-7 showing from the floor and the TMC starters alone committed 12 turnovers.
