Peter Suder scored a team-high 15 points, Kam Craft and Evan Ipsaro added 14 apiece, and Miami held off Ohio for a 73-69 victory in front of 7,889 spectators on One Miami Day.
“That’s the loudest our arena has been since I’ve been here,” said Steele, who is in his third season of coaching the RedHawks. “I’ll never forget the first game I came out. It was against Evansville, year one. Man, you could hear a pin drop — like, literally. There may have been about, it seemed like, 30 people in the building.
“To be able to see it kind of grow during this timeframe has been a lot of fun. Give our students a lot of credit for getting out here tonight. We need to keep them in here to make Millett the hardest place to play in the (Mid-American Conference).”
Miami has won 10 of its last 11, moving its record to 16-5 overall and 8-1 in the MAC. Ohio, which was slated preseason to win the conference, fell to 11-10, 5-4 MAC. Ohio’s Shereef Mitchell led all scorers with 20 points.
“I thought the game — it’s obviously a rivalry game — was an ugly game in a lot of ways,” Steele said. “We were saddled with a lot of foul trouble — whether it was Antwone (Woolfolk), whether it was (Suder), whether it was Eian (Elmer), whether it was Evan. A lot of guys, but we do have a lot of depth. We’ve got to finish the game though.”
AJ Brown hit a pair of free throws to give Ohio a 14-7 lead with 15:08 left in the first half. Then Miami put together a 14-0 run that was capped off by a Reece Potter dunk, and the RedHawks led 32-22 with 4:19 remaining before the half.
Luke Skaljak’s three-point play gave Miami its largest lead at 56-42 with 9:27 remaining, and Ohio started to make a comeback thanks to a 13-2 run that pulled the Bobcats to within 64-63 with under 3 minutes left to play.
Ipsaro had a driving layup and Elmer scored on a Potter back-door pass to keep Miami on top late in the game.
“We needed it. We were struggling,” Steele said. “I thought we stalled out offensively. They were trying to pressure us, playing five guards, switch everything, heat us up during those moments. And we struggled with it.”
Miami got 35 points off the bench — led by Ipsaro’s 14 and nine from Skaljac and Potter.
“It’s just who we have,” Ipsaro said. “No one’s caring about how many points they actually score. The only thing we care about is how many points are up on the scoreboard as a team.”
Ipsaro, who has steadily enhanced his role off the bench, soaked in the opportunity to compete in front of a boisterous home crowd.
“Everybody on this team, we haven’t played — even people that have been here last year — we’ve never played in an environment like that at Millett,” Ipsaro said. “When everybody comes out, we were so excited for this game because we’ve been hearing that a lot of people were going to be coming, and this place is going to be packed. And it was.
“I think we really fed off that energy — especially when we went on our runs. A lot of the crowd fed into that.”
Miami travels to Western Michigan on Tuesday.
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