West Virginia State men's basketball coach
Bryan Poore has had a plan this year.
Use a deep bench to wear down opposing teams with constant defensive pressure and frequent substitutions.
It would be hard to imagine the strategy working any better than it did Saturday.
The Yellow Jackets fell behind visiting Shepherd early and trailed 49-33 at halftime but steadily wore down the Rams in the second half to end up with a 92-87 win to open conference play.
"It was a great team win," Poore said. "The bench came in and gave us a huge lift with their energy."
Robert Fomby finished with a team high 20 points and hit two of the biggest buckets of the game in the closing minutes.
First the 6-3 senior hit a 3-pointer from the top of the key with 2:50 to play to tie the score at 84-84.
Then he rebounded a Yellow Jacket miss and laid the ball in to grab an 86-84 lead.
Shepherd led by 18 at 63-45 with 14:34 left in the game. WVSU out-scored the Rams 47-24 from that point.
The Yellow Jackets took one little bite out of the lead and then a big one on the way to pulling ahead.
They started with a little 10-4 run to pull to within 67-55.
Shepherd hit a bucket to make it 69-55 but then watched as the Jackets went on a game-tying 16-2 run that ended with a Fomby tip-in making the score 71-71 with 8:06 still to play.
The Rams gathered themselves for one last stand and actually managed to pulled ahead by six points at 80-74.
But by then they were running on fumes while the Yellow Jackets, with no player seeing more than 21 minutes of action, still had fresh legs.
WVSU hit just 30.4 percent from the floor in the first half  but ended up shooting 40.3 for the game after going 6-of-12 from the floor the final eight minutes.
"We had multiple people make big plays down the stretch," Poore said. "We needed a win like this against a top team in the league to gain some confidence."
Fomby added another bucket inside and
Ernest Jenkins hit four straight free throws down the stretch to seal the victory.
Jenkins added 17 points while
Pat Johnson-Agwu finished with 15 and 13 rebounds.
WVSU is back in action Monday night against Fairmont State.
Women's Game: Shepherd 63, WVSU 55
The Yellow Jacket women could not hold off visiting Shepherd as the Rams erased nearly all of an 11-point WVSU lead in the third period pulling to within a point going into the fourth.
The visitors then outscored the Jackets 19-10 over the final 10 minutes as WVSU fell 63-55 in the Mountain East Conference opener for both teams.
WVSU hit just 28.8 percent overall and 12 percent from 3-point range in tha contest.The final quarter was particularly tough as the Yellow Jackets could get just two out of 10 shots to fall.
Shea Hines led WVSU with 11 points while
Denisha Bowman had a strong outing with eight points, nine rebounds, and five blocks.
Â
