Maintaining home-court advantage is what it's all about for the Grambling State men's basketball team.
And it succeeded in keeping that advantage intact.
Redshirt freshman Ron Ellis scored all 11 of his points in the second half, including a huge 3-point shot with 9:34 left, as the Tigers are now a perfect 2-0 at home since the renovation of Memorial Gymnasium with a 66-55 victory over Texas Southern on Monday night.
"We had to win this game," GSU junior forward William McDonald said. "We wanted to keep our representation of winning in the new gym."
Grambling (5-10, 3-3) improved its record to .500 in the Southwestern Athletic Conference race, while Texas Southern (1-11, 1-3) remains in eighth place in the SWAC.
Texas Southern kept Grambling on the ropes all night as GSU was unable to find the right defensive punch to knock out TSU.
The two teams battled in the first half with GSU coming out at halftime with only a 28-27 lead.
"We'll I knew Texas Southern would come out like that," Grambling coach Larry Wright said. "They have a coach from the high school ranks and we knew that they would come to play. Texas Southern played great defense with man-to-man pressure. We didn't know how to handle it. But we made the adjustments in the second half, but it took us awhile and the credit goes to Texas Southern."
The second half appeared to be more of the same, until sophomore forward Paul Haynes got GSU started on offense.
Grambling was able to put together a 14-5 run, relying on good man-to-man defense and a bit of a cold shooting from TSU.
Ellis, a former Vidalia grad, was able to cap off the run with five straight points as he got McDonald into the act. The two later hooked up on a dunk with 1:15 seconds left with the Tigers in command at 63-49.
"We know what Ellis and McDonald are capable of," Wright said. "Ellis is counted on for shooting the ball and McDonald for scoring in the paint. But most importantly, I think it was their defense that helped us. Ellis did what he had to do and McDonald had a good game, I don't know how many block shots he had."
McDonald finished with 14 points and five block shots.
"Our defense wasn't as tight as it supposed to be, we had to pick it up," Ellis said. "We had to make a change and we went out there and made the changes."
There were five lead changes, with Texas Southern taking its last one with 12:18 to go in the second half on a 3-pointer by junior guard Ra'Kim Hollis.
Junior guard Nick Hall scored 19 points and Haynes finished with 18 for Grambling.
Hollis led TSU with 21 points, while Stephen Hoyer had 16.
Grambling State shot 50 percent to Texas Southern's 35.6, and outrebounded TSU 37-30.
The Tigers return to action, 7:30 p.m., Saturday, January 19 against Mississippi Valley State in H&PE Arena on the TSU Campus.
