Women's team players wear T-shirts to honor men's players

By Allen Etzler
Published in Sports on March 26, 2015 1:48 PM

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aetzler@newsargus.com

Donning her decorative T-shirt dedicated to her best friend, Shy'lia Buie took a seat front and center in the University of Mount Olive cafeteria as the Trojans' men's basketball team played in their Elite Eight game against Tarleton State on the projection screen.

While the University of Mount Olive basketball watch party started with a filled cafeteria cheering on their Trojans, a power outage in the cafeteria ended the enthusiasm as abruptly as Tarleton State ended Mount Olive's season.

Buie and a group of girls on the women's basketball team made T-shirts with the last names of the men's players they are closest with on the back. Buie's shirt was for guard Dontrell Brite.

"I'm extremely proud of him and excited to see him up there. I wish I could have been there for him to hear me yelling. Regardless of the loss I'm always going to be proud of him because he worked very hard to get the team to the Elite 8," Buie said.

Two other lady Trojans, Anamaria Zjacic and Rachel Fehl, had shirts for JaQuan Blount and Kendall Hargrove, while they watched the game live in Evansville, Ind.

Buie and Brite's friendship started because of basketball. Each of them have spent so much time in the Trojans program, it would be difficult not to have any kind of relationship together.

The Trojans' student body started off the game as energetic as the basketball team did. They rode the roller coaster of emotions as Mount Olive started hot and allowed Tarleton State to get back in the game, and then continued to hang around until there was about 13 minutes left in the game.

Tarleton's Mo Lee knocked down a 30-footer as the shot clock expired and put an early nail in the coffin.

When Lee's three dropped, the air left the cafeteria.

Then the power went out and nearly all of the students left, hoping to get to a laptop just in time to see a Trojans comeback.

"I ran to my teammates' room to watch the rest of it," Buie said.

There would be no comeback.

But the somber faces wouldn't last long. Buie and her peers understood what this year's run means for the Trojans athletics program.

"I think their run puts Mount Olive on the map and lets people know we're not just some small town that creates pickles," Buie said.