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Southeast’s shooting leads to a Liberty loss

LIBERTY — The Liberty Leopards hosted Southeast on Monday night, and the Pirates came away with a 58-30 Mahoning Valley Athletic Conference victory.

“We’ve got a lot of respect for Liberty’s coach,” Southeast coach Matt Dillon said. “He’s a good coach. He works hard with the kids. We knew it would be a very difficult task to come to Liberty and get a victory. I’m really proud of how our kids played tonight.”

Steven Arnold is in his first season as the coach at Liberty (4-7, 0-2) after many seasons as both the football and basketball coach at Warren Harding.

“We had a bad night tonight,” Arnold said. “This wasn’t indicative of how we’ve been playing. I got the job the last week in October. We didn’t have the summer with workouts and a chance to install what I needed to install. We tried to condense everything in a short period of time. We still have a lot of work to do.”

The Pirates (7-5, 3-2) came out hot from long distance. Southeast nailed three shots from behind the 3-point arc and built a 22-8 lead at the end of the first quarter.

“We shot the ball well,” Dillon said. “Tonight, I was really pleased with our defense. We rebounded the ball well. Obviously, we made some shots early.”

Southeast extended the lead in the second quarter, and the Pirates built a 32-15 advantage at halftime.

Sophomore Cohen Richardson made five shots from downtown, and led all scorers with a game-high 21 points as the Pirates led 50-24 heading to the fourth quarter.

Sophomore Ramsey Hadi-Cox led the Leopards with 12 points. Senior Evan Bates added seven points. Sophomore Joe Croom and freshman Ameer Haynes also had a couple of big blocked shots on defense.

“Southeast is well coached,” Arnold said. “They shot the ball extremely well. They ran their offense. You could tell that they’re a team, and they’ve been together for a while. They move the ball, and they trust one another. That’s where I want to get our team at. It’s back to the drawing board.”

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