Photo by Joe Lovell West Liberty’s Finley Woodward drives toward the basket while Fairmont State’s Rudy Fitzgibbons III defends on Sunday inside WesBanco Arena during the MEC men’s basketball championship game.

WHEELING — Sunday’s crescendo of the five-day MEC basketball tournament kept on building. And building. And building some more.

The final game of the tournament inside WesBanco Arena, the men’s championship pitting No. 1 West Liberty against No. 2 Fairmont State, had more action than could be contained in regulation– and even in multiple overtimes. It took three overtime periods before the Fairmont State Falcons could capture their second-ever MEC Men’s Basketball Championship over the Hilltoppers, 122-114.

In a rematch of the 2017, 2021 and 2023 championships, the Falcons outlasted West Liberty, who will have to regroup before the start of the DII NCAA Tournament.

“The saying is it’s hard to beat a team three times, I guess it’s true,” West Liberty head coach Ben Howlett said. “Usually after losses, I’m a little more down than I am right now, I’m actually super proud of my team, I thought their effort was really good. All 10 guys who played, I thought their effort was really good.

“I always try to find something positive when we lose, and the positive is that we’re not done playing yet. There’s a bigger tournament coming up and I’ve been a part of West Liberty teams who lose this game and then go through the region and get to the Elite Eight. We’re going to be on a mission. We’re going to get better this week, and we’ll be ready for whoever we play. Congratulations to Fairmont and coach [Tim] Koenig and their team.”

The Falcons sent the game to overtime on an Andre Harris midair putback with three second left, a score which tied the game 86-86.

That’d be a familiar sight in the closing seconds of the rest of the game.

Impressively, Harris also scored on a putback with 15 seconds to play in the first overtime to tie the game 95-95 and send the contest to a second overtime, and once again scored a putback with 14 seconds left to tie the game 104-104 and send the game to a third overtime.

Harris finished with 14 points, nine rebounds, and plenty of late-game heroics. Fairmont State was led in scoring by tournament MVP Rudy Fitzgibbons III, who scored a game-high 26 points.

“Fitzgibbons is a good player,” Howlett said. “I’ll put Lanyc [Shuler] on anybody in the county, I trust him, he’s going to get stops. [Fitzgibbons] made some plays, let’s give him credit before we start saying what we did wrong.

“He made some plays. On the flip side, once he did miss, Andre Harris got a rebound, put it up and in. We weren’t able to complete the play, get a stop and finish the game.”

Howlett recognized that his Hilltoppers were one rebound short of a conference title– three times over.

“We had our chances to win– and that’s what’s frustrating if you want me to nit-pick,” the eighth-year head coach said. “We had multiple chances to get a stop and then a rebound, and we were probably going to win the game if we were able to do that.

“There’s stuff you remember […] as a coach you can look and say ‘Should I have done this? Should I have done that?’ You can drive yourself crazy about it. It was just a great basketball game. I thought the crowd was great, the arena was great. THey certainly got their money’s worth today.”

In the third overtime, the Hilltoppers couldn’t generate much offense. They shot 2-10 overall, while Fairmont State still seemed in fine form, shooting 5-6 from the field. Fairmont State shot 6-6 from the foul line, West Liberty shot 5-6, and the Hilltoppers’ title hopes slipped away starting around the 25-second mark with a turnover by Kyler D’Augustino when the junior collided with a defender while driving down the lane. With possession of the ball and a 118-114 lead, the Falcons did their job at the foul line for a win that was long in the works.

“I think fatigue, and that’s on me,” Howlett said of his team’s offensive struggles down the homestretch. “I felt really good with the guys who were playing. You have a guy in the game for 45 minutes, it’s hard to take them out because the sub’s been sitting for a long time. I’m proud of the effort, the effort wasn’t the issue. Just didn’t make enough shots to get a win.”

West Liberty wa led in scoring by Lanyc Shuler, who scored 23 points in the championship marathon. D’Augustino and JJ Harper each scored 20 points, while Finley Woodward scored 19.

West Liberty won the turnover differential 25-15, while Fairmont State out-rebounded their opponents 57-39.

In the first half, West Liberty came out cold, failing to find their footing early while Fairmont State worked their way to a 13-point lead at the 11:32 mark of the first half, the biggest lead in the game by either team.

Despite this, West Liberty flipped the tables on their opponent and took a 44-43 lead at halftime.

“I thought their defense was really good at the beginning of the game, maybe overdribbled a little bit, didn’t pass the ball like we usually do,” Howlett said of his team’s start. “We dug ourselves a hole, but then to go into halftime up one, I felt pretty good. I don’t know what we stretched it out to in the second half, they just made more plays then us down the stretch.”

It was the Hilltoppers’ turn to stretch out a lead in the second half, going up by as much as 11 before things tightened up in the final minutes.

“Hit a couple shots from the perimeter,” Howlett said of his team’s resurgence after going down double digits. “Had a hard time getting clean shots from there. We can score in bunches really fast. If we’re down 10 or 11, we can make that disappear real quick. That’s how we play. There was no panic within our team. We knew everything’s A-okay, we’re going to figure it out. Went up one at halftime and as a coaching staff we were feeling pretty good.”

West Liberty shot 40.8% from the field, including 35.6% from 3 on Sunday. Fairmont State had a banner day with 54.3% shooting and 57.1% accuracy from distance.

It was West Liberty’s ninth championship game appearance, most in the conference. The Hilltoppers’ four titles remain the most in the MEC.

“Now it’s the NCAA Tournament,” Howlett said. “Now it’s– you win, you advance, you lose, you’re done for the year. This team has the ability to make a run, we’ve improved a lot. We got beat by a really good team today. It stings, it sucks but we’re going to move on from this. We’ll come out Saturday swinging.”

WOMEN’S BASKETBALL

#1 Fairmont State def. #6 Glenville State, 79-65

WHEELING — The Falcons defeated the Pioneers by a decisive margin behind 41 combined points from Alyssa DeAngelo and Leslie Huffman.

DeAngelo scored 21 and Huffman 20 for Fairmont State, now repeat champions after defeating West Virginia State last season.

Jalen Gibbs collected a highly effective 13-point, 14-rebound double-double in 18 minutes for Fairmont State.

Glenville State received 17 points from each of Dream Cherry and Tynasia Bunting. The Pioneers led 36-33 at halftime.