By splitting its weekend games, the NIU men’s basketball team gave coach Rob Judson his first victory as a Division I head coach.

With the Huskies’ 87-65 victory Saturday night over Texas Southern University in the 40th annual Marquette University Blue & Gold Cocoa-Cola Classic, the Huskies recovered from the previous night’s loss to Sam Houston State, 80-73.

The win, something that took the Huskies until Dec. 6 to accomplish last year against a Division III team, put NIU ahead of last season’s pace.

Judson said he feels good about his team’s effort in both of the weekend games and was particularly happy with NIU’s play against TSU.

“We had a lot of effort and we competed,” Judson said. “When you can put up 87 points in a Division I game, your attack mentality is pretty good. One thing we really tried to do was play the game in four minute segments. We won four of the five in the first half. We wanted to win each of those five segments. I think we won only two in the second half. When you’re up that big, you’re playing a lot of people and it’s tough.”

The leading scorer in both games for NIU was senior forward Leon Rodgers. Amassing 47 points and 24 rebounds in the course of both games, Rodgers moved up two spots on the Huskies’ all-time leading scorers chart.

Rogers now occupies the No. 15 spot all-time with 1,150 points. He leap-frogged George Bork (1,114 points in 1960-63) and Jim Bradley (1,134 career points in 1971-73).

“Leon is on his way,” Judson said. “The goal for him is to average a double double in points and rebounds. He has to continue to get rebounds like he did tonight. I thought our efforts on the boards (NIU won, 37-23) and the fact we held them to 33.3 percent shooting were pretty good. Those are two good effort statistics for us.”

Against TSU, sophomore Perry Smith added 16 points, while junior Eugene Bates and freshman Jamel Staten both tallied 12 points apiece.

In NIU’s 80-73 loss against Sam Houston State on Friday, in addition to Rodgers’ 22 points and 13 rebounds, junior Sean Ezell contributed 12 points, eight assists and three steals, while Smith notched 10 points and four rebounds.

Judson knows from the Sam Houston State loss that his team needs to finish games as good as it starts them.

“Our No. 1 goal was effort and competitiveness,” Judson said afterwards. “We feel good about those two things. The next step is to continue our fundamentals while we have that effort and competitiveness. Finally, we need to close out games. The last four minutes our fundamentals were not where they will be in the future.”