Falcons thrash Volunteers to reach title game
</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[Mamadou Seck poured in 24 points, Troy Long and Charles Ashford each put in 21 points apiece as the Southeastern Illinois College men's basketball team wiped out top seed John A. Logan en route to the Region 24 title game.
"They might not have played this way for the first two-thirds of the year, but right now this team is good enough to play with or beat everybody," head coach Todd Franklin said after the game.
SIC (22-9) will square off against Wabash Valley College, which knocked off No. 2 seed Southwestern Illinois College in the second game of Friday's double-header.
Southeastern Illinois faced an early 6-0 deficit, but buckets by Seck, Will Kirksey and Long put the team back in the game with a 7-6 lead. The Falcons and Volunteers battled back-and-forth for a few moments before Seck drove to the hole and put in another two to give the tournament's No. 4 seed an 11-10 lead it would build on as the game went on.
After facing an 8-7 deficit, Southeastern connected with seven straight shots and went on a 21-4 run as it took a stranglehold on the lead.
Long contributed 13 points in the first half and said it was the team's work on defense help initiate the offense.
"You have to be focused in this type of tournament on every play and every possession," Long explained. "We've played with intensity and hard defense. That has been our two main points. If we can do that, we can beat anybody."
The Volunteers have been nationally ranked throughout the season, and Coach Franklin has compared their length with that of a team from the Southeastern Conference of Division I.
SIC handed John A. Logan its first conference loss of the season when Ashford nailed a floater in the closing seconds of a 72-70 overtime win on Feb. 24.
"They've got big-time talent all over the place," Franklin said. "For us to win the basketball game in that way made for a truly impressive victory."
The Falcons' biggest lead came at the 12:32 mark when an Isaac McClure pull-up jumper gave the squad a 67-39 lead. It was a deficit the Volunteers would never recover from despite getting 24 points from Lazaric Jones and 18 from Jesse Perry.
Franklin said the team's persistent effort and execution sparked the victory.
"As long as you get good shots from the people you want taking them, then you're executing," Franklin said. "It doesn't look pretty to the crowd unless it goes in. We talked a lot about trusting it, not worrying about it and executing it. At this time of the year, you've got to trust it."