by Alejandro Aaron, Student Report
The rival game against Southwestern Oklahoma State University on Thursday was the talk on campus for the whole week previous.
As soon as the teams took the court for warmups, the energy immediately shot through the roof.
With trash talk filling the environment, the players from SWOSU tried to ignore it but they ended up giving a reaction to the crowd.
SWOSU won the tip off to get possession of the ball first. They ended up adding two points to the scoreboard and NWOSU answered back with one of their own.
For a while, the game was a defensive game with the score being tied at 2-2 up until the first time out was taken at almost one-third of the way into the first where SWOSU just finished a scoring run where the score was 15-7.
SWOSU was able to hold a good lead until eight minutes before halftime where NWOSU began to execute offensively and start to comeback. NWOSU was able to go into halftime just trailing by one point.
The deficit didn’t really increase or decrease too much after halftime. The game stayed relatively close.
With the second half coming to a conclusion the game was tied as the time ran out. The regulation clock hit all zeros and the score was still tied which forced an overtime.
The Rangers held the lead throughout the whole overtime until the last shot, where SWOSU made a buzzerbeater to give them the lead as the time expired.
“I know we gave it our all out there but when that isn’t not enough it hurts, we just have to do better to be better,” said Parrish Hewitt, a member of the basketball team. “We knew it was going to be a war because of how big this rivalry is. We gave it all we had and fell short. We just have to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
The postgame celebration for SWOSU involved a player going to the student section to show sportsmanship that was misinterpreted and led to some arguing and pushing afterwards that was quickly stopped and resolved.
“Every loss comes with a lesson and we just have to learn from this and improve so we never feel this pain again,” Nate Bailey III said.
Southwestern Oklahoma State University and Southeastern Oklahoma University both took down the Rangers to tally onto the loss the column.
Northwestern looks to bounce back as the take on Ouachita Baptist University on Feb. 20 in Arkadelphia, Arkansas.