The Wabash College Little Giants opened their conference schedule with a tough, hard-fought loss to the 11th ranked Wooster College Fighting Scots 66-62.

"It was gutsy," head coach Kyle Brumett said. "I was happy that we have guys that hold themselves and our team to 'WAF.' If you're going to come here you better believe in it, and we have guys that do. Wabash Always Fights and we did that."

Wabash came out and showed that they were not going to back down from the very start as they used their zone to hold Wooster to just 34 points on 32 shots in the first half.

The only lapse in the first half was turning the ball over eight times which led to 11 points off turnovers for Wooster.

"In the stretches we got behind, we had a lot of turnovers," Brumett said. "We had runs in the first half where we had some good shots. We were 3-for-13 from two, with eight turnovers. Our guys are better than that and when we are playing really good teams we need to capitalize on those good looks."

Freshman Colten Garland scored 14 of his game high 23 points in the first half including a perfect 4-of-4 from deep. Sophomore Evan Frank had six points and eight rebounds in the first half on his way to another double-double. Sophomore Ben Stachowski, in his first game of the year, was the other double figure scorer for Wabash with 10 points.

"It's impressive what Ben did today with being out for almost three months," Brumett said. "Evan is unconventional, but he is good. He is really hard to guard. Colten played really well tonight, he has no fear of going into the paint and scoring and then can hit his free throws."

In the second half, Wooster started to pull away as they took at a 14 point lead with 9:22 left in the game but Wabash made a push to get the Wooster lead down to eight with just over two minutes left in the game.

Wabash then scored six straight to pull within two, 64-62 with 22 seconds left but it was just too late to tie the game as they were forced to foul and Wooster converted their free throws to take the game 66-62.

Wabash held Wooster to 66 points on 62 shots while scoring 62 points on 43 shots of their own. The key for the game though was the points off turnovers of which Wooster scored 17 points.

Wabash will travel to #8 Ohio Wesleyan on Wednesday night with the opening tip set for 7:30 p.m.