The Western Nebraska Community College men's basketball team showed a lot of grit in their season-opening game with Snow College on Friday.

                WNCC outscored the Badgers 54-49 in the second half and cutting a 16-point deficit down to four with 17 seconds to play before falling 95-89.

                WNCC will have another contest Saturday when they host Dodge City Community College at 6 p.m. Snow College will face Casper College at 4 p.m. on Saturday.

                WNCC head coach Roybell Baez was proud of his team for the way they came back and never gave up.

                "There is no moral victories but, you know, we're down five guys and five rotation guys. We have a bunch of freshmen out there with a couple sophomores," Baez said. "I just think we did a good job. It wasn't a good job of like scoring; it was just a good job of continuing to fight. As a head coach, you just want to see fight. Snow is literally one of the best teams in the entire country. They are super talented with a super world coach and we could have literally just put our heads down and just got beat by 30 or 40 like we did last year at Snow. But our guys fought we hung in there."

                The fight was evident in the second half. WNCC trailed 81-65 with about five minutes to play. With two minutes to play, Snow led 91-78 and that was when the Cougars outscored Snow 11-4 and made it 93-89 with 19 seconds to play on a Isaiah St. Preux triple. The big play followed as Snow missed two free throws with 17.8 seconds, but the Badgers got the rebound and converted one free throw.

                Baez said that rebound by Snow after the miss was a crucial juncture of the game.

                "There's a lot of things that you can go back and look and say, oh, we will do this differently, but I'll say this, we have a really good group of kids," he said. "They are here to play basketball and for me personally, I just want to coach good kids. We have a good group of kids who really love each other. They believe in each other, and they're resilient. I'm proud of them. Again, no moral victories; we just have to come back tomorrow (Saturday) and try to go 1 and 0 tomorrow. "

                Snow jumped to a 26-8 lead in the first half and led 43-26. WNCC came back and outscored Snow 9-3 in the final minutes of the first half to trail the Badgers 46-35 at halftime.

                WNCC sliced the deficit to 49-41 early in the second half on a Toms Linis 3-pointer. Snow came right back and went on an 11-0 run to lead 60-41. That was the crucial run of the game.

                Snow shot 58 percent from the field and connected on nine triples. The Badgers were 18-of-35 from the free-throw line. The Cougars shot just 38 from the field but connected on 17 3-pointers. WNCC hit 11 triples in the second half. The Cougars were also just 20-of-33 from the free-throw line.

                Linis led the Cougars with 23 points, including six 3-pointers. WNCC also had three other players finish with double-figure scoring. Xavier Kirkpatrick had 18 points with four 3-pointers while St. Preux and Viktor Lukic-Gavric each had 12 points.

Snow                   46 49 – 95
WNCC                35 54 – 89
SNOW
McCaden Adams 28, Sam Sivulich 4, Brock McClure 26, Aaron Bliss 8, Kyle Lemke 12 blake Bahr 1, Keagan Caton 5, Sean Felts 11.
WNCC
Isaiah St. Preux 12, Viktor Lukic-Gavric 12, Amare Jackson 7, Dorin Nguema 4, Toms Linis 23, Xavier Kirkpatrick 18, Noah Jones 5, Melchi Egbeyemi 8.