Last place Cal Poly men’s basketball upsets Fullerton in Big West tourney
Cal Poly men’s basketball upset Cal State Fullerton 87-82 in a first-round Big West Conference tournament win in Las Vegas.
The Mustangs (4-19) were led by sophomore guard Colby Rogers who poured in 21 points on 7 of 13 shooting, and Cal Poly drained 67% of its 3-pointers as a team.
Cal Poly came into the game as the 10th seed in the tournament, the lowest rank, after a 1-15 conference record, last place in the Big West during the regular season.
The Mustangs are the first Big West team since 1994 to record a tournament win as the last place seed.
Alimamy Koroma, the team’s 6-8 forward, tallied 18 points and senior point guard Keith Smith notched 10 points with six assists, drilling two of three from behind the arc.
“I think we’ve grown a lot through this journey, and the future is bright for these young guys,” Smith said in a postgame virtual press conference. “We showed fight throughout the whole game. During the season, we had lapses where we didn’t fight until the end. Today, we didn’t have any lapses.”
Rogers said the team had a different mentality coming into the game with “nothing to lose at this point.”
“Our record is what it is,” Rogers said. “We can’t change that now. We came into this conference tournament in our eyes 0-0. We let the past be the past, we learned from our mistakes and executed our game plan. We went out and played our hardest.”
Cal Poly coach beats former school
Cal Poly Head Coach John Smith previously coached as an assistant at Fullerton and had a good sense of the system the Titans run, which helped with the game planning.
The Titans (6-10) and Mustangs were both affected by practice interruptions and a late start to the season due to COVID-19 precautions, which made consistency with player development challenging during the course of the season, John Smith said.
“We didn’t have a normal preparation time,” Smith said. “Kudos to our guys for knowing there’s a bigger purpose at the end of it and the bigger purpose is they’re young, they get this year back, and we’re building off these things. That’s how they stay motivated.”
Tuuka Jaakkola and Kobe Sanders both added 10 points for Cal Poly.
The Mustangs next play UC Irvine, the conference’s second-ranked team on Thursday at 5 p.m.
For information on live streaming of the game, go to gopoly.com/sports/mens-basketball/schedule.
This story was originally published March 9, 2021 at 8:54 PM with the headline "Last place Cal Poly men’s basketball upsets Fullerton in Big West tourney."
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