A continued battle with injuries left the Baker men’s basketball team undersized and unable to grab a win against Lindenwood University Saturday.

Down by four points at halftime, the men lost leverage in the second half and fell to a 64-44 conference loss. Head coach Rick Weaver said a burst by Lindenwood in the end left the men unable to recover, which sealed the team’s fate.

“Actually, we hung in there pretty good for about 30 minutes, but they broke it open with a couple threes and we couldn’t answer and that was pretty much it,” Weaver said.

Injuries to the inside players have left the team searching for more of a post presence and looking for a new strategy to compete with the tough conference competition.

“We are trying to control tempo a little bit more to hang in there and that was our plan against Lindenwood,” Weaver said. “The team did a pretty good job of getting control on tempo for about 30 minutes until Lindenwood got hot and wore us down a little bit there at the end.”

Senior Brock Entner said with players down, the team struggled to keep energy up on the court and keep up with the pace Lindenwood was setting.

“Other teams are just deeper than us, really,” Entner said. “They have more people to bring off the bench and we don’t have as many people so that we can’t keep coming in with new fresh legs.”

With a newly eligible player who nears the charts at seven feet tall playing for the Lions, the Baker men struggled to control the inside game.

“The difference in the game was really just their big guy on the inside,” senior Malcolm Greer said. “They kept going in to him, which was kind of beating us down.”

In the midst of a string of losses, the team was able to celebrate a high point for Greer, who in mid-January reached the 1,000-career point mark in the Wildcat’s game against William Jewell College.

“It was kind of a milestone for me and I’m just glad that I have been able to have the chance to get to that point in my career,” Greer said.

With hopes to turn the season around, the team will hit the road and face Evangel University at 4 p.m. Saturday in Springfield, Mo.

"I think overall we feel like we have talent and we feel like we can win games, but we just need to start bringing it together and start building on it and we have got to start getting some wins," Entner said. <br/>