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March 10, 2004 Richmond, VA - Shawn Wiggins and Thurman Zimmerman provided an outside-inside combination that proved to be too much as South Carolina State rolled to an easy, 84-56 win over Maryland Eastern Shore in the quarterfinal round of the 2004 Dodge Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference Basketball Tournament at the Richmond Coliseum. The top seeded Bulldogs will play the winner of the Hampton-Florida A&M quarterfinal match on Friday, live on MBC-TV at approximately 2:30 p.m. Wiggins, a junior guard from Suffolk, Va., hit on 7 of 12 from the floor, including 5 of 9 from three-point range to open up the offense for Zimmerman. The 6-5 Zimmerman, the MEAC Player of the Year, did most of his damage from inside the paint area on 5 of 10 shooting and 9 of 13 from the charity stripe. He added 4 assists and 7 rebounds to his resume' for good measure. The Hawks (8-21), the Number 9 seed, stayed within striking distance through most of the first half and early in the second on the scoring of senior guard Thomas "Tee" Trotter, who single-handedly kept his team in the game with a game-high 36 points, 33 coming through the first half and the first 13 minutes of the second half. But the Bulldogs defense stiffened and limited Trotter to only one basket, a three-pointer the rest of the way. "We tried a lot of different things on Tee in the first half, but nothing seemed to work," admitted SC State Head Coach Ben Betts. "He is a great scorer because he can beat you from the outside and he can put it on the floor and create problems once he gets in the lane." From there, S.C. State took turns running its offense and shot almost 60 percent (11 of 19) from the field. "We expected others to step up tonight and they did not," said Trotter, the father of "Tee" Trotter. "All the frustration of the game and the season came out tonight. It was and has been very frustrating. We thought we had a very good chance, but give SC State credit. They kept us off balance.
Brian Mason, the MEAC rookie of the year, added 12 for the Bulldogs. The game was the final one in the careers of four seniors Javes Wiggins, Didier Socka, Kirk Wesley, and Trotter. Story taken from the Official MEAC Media Relations Release |
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