IU Columbus’ Damontae Thompson (10) greets his teammates before during player introductions before a college basketball game against East-West University in the Circle K Fieldhouse in Columbus, Ind., Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025.
Mike Wolanin | The Republic
IU Columbus men’s basketball coach James Adams talked during the offseason about how much improved the Crimson Pride would be in their second year of existence.
Tuesday afternoon, they had a chance to show their fans what Adams had been talking about. IUC opened the 2025-26 season by rolling to a 107-73 win against East-West University.
“We really just wanted to make a statement for our team and for our community, just showing how hard we’ve been working,” junior point guard Damontae Thompson said. “We just wanted to make this our statement game, coming out with a bunch of energy and getting fired up ready to play. We definitely made major improvements, just on the things that we didn’t have as far as bigs and rebounding. We did give up some boards, but that’s going to work out throughout the season.”
Thompson scored 17 points to lead a balanced Crimson Pride attack. IUC put seven players in double figures and had two more with eight points.
“That’s always the goal — to get a balanced attack,” Adams said. “Getting guys to be able to produce, it’s not going to always be like that. We feel like if guys play their their role, and our defense does what it needs to do, we feel that we’ll be offensively productive.”
The Crimson Pride led start to finish against an East-West team from Chicago that arrived at Nexus Park only about 20 minutes before the scheduled noon tipoff. The Phantoms were within 17-16 midway through the first half when IUC went on a 17-6 run to take control. The Crimson Pride built the lead to 47-31 at halftime.
“Our goal each day in practice is just to try to get 1 percent better,” Adams said. “We’re focusing on being a really good, defensive team. We knew that coming in the first game, there’s always going to be some butterflies. We started off a little bit slow, and I had a conversation with the team, and we kind of got things rolling defensively, and that’s what I told them — our defense creates our offense.”
IUC led by as many as 37 points at 83-46 with 8:35 remaining.
“It’s definitely huge making a statement,” senior center Trevin Lieck said. “We really wanted to give the fans a good show, show them what they’re in for the rest of the season. Through August and September, we were just itching to play somebody else because we had two months of just going against each other. So this was really a time to play to get to get everything out against somebody else and really show what we could do.”
The 6-foot-8 Lieck, a graduate transfer from Western Colorado, gives the Crimson Pride —who won just two games and scored 100 points only twice last season — an inside presence they didn’t have last year. He finished with 16 points and a team-high eight rebounds.
Derald Blackmon scored 12 points off the bench. Jennings County graduate Owen Law had 11 points and four steals, Jermayn Baxter scored 11 points, Daylon Johnson had 10 points and five assists and Shauntez Cain came off the bench to add 10 points and eight rebounds. LaRenzo Hopkins and Bobby Wonnell each chipped in eight points off the bench.
“I’m excited,” Lieck said. “Today’s game was just an all-around team game. We were all clicking together. Seven guys in double figures, that’s just great all-around team basketball.”
IUC will play Kuyper Friday and Grace Christian Saturday, both in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to begin a six-game road trip. The next home game is Nov. 13 against Goshen.
“It’s definitely a big confidence boost,” Thompson said. “We just want to keep doing it and stacking good days day-by-day. We’re not going to take anything lightly, just come back to the drawing board and figure it out.”
