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Sick of staring at a 0-4 record, Saint Mary’s Huskies head coach Ross Quackenbush put his team through boot camp over the last 10 days.

It may have paid off in a win Tuesday night.

The Huskies rallied late for a 92-86 AUS men’s basketball win over the unbeaten Dalhousie Tigers at The Tower. Dalhousie slipped to 3-1.

Joey Haywood poured in 30 points and stroked a three-pointer from the baseline with 54 seconds left to put his team up 88-86. Torey Fassett added a bucket and Haywood added two free throws as the Huskies closed on a 12-2 run.

The game featured two of the esteemed point guards in the nation with Haywood and Simon Farine going nose-to-nose. Farine had 27 with three treys in the fourth quarter.

"One of the things we needed to learn was how hard you can actually go before your body fails," Quackenbush said. "I don’t think we were anywhere near the level of energy and exertion that we needed to be in order to give ourselves a chance to win basketball games.

"We worked on fundamentals, but also the basics of digging deep and taking a pound of flesh, literally."

Haywood said it hasn’t been easy around Camp Quack since a pair of losses last weekend at Cape Breton.

"Coach just made us run every single time," Haywood said. "We were running all day. But you can see tonight we executed well and we played hard."

It was a game of runs in the first half with SMU taking a 44-39 lead to half-time.

Four treys, two from Simon Marr, had the Huskies up 60-50 halfway through the third quarter, but some hot shooting from Farine and Peter Leighton carved the lead to 66-63 after 30 minutes.

The Tigers came all the way back to lead by four on a Farine three with 3:25 left, but a Demitri Harris triple had SMU up 85-84 with 1:16 on the clock.

The Huskies were a victim of a rough schedule. After an opening night loss at home against Acadia, they lost to national contenders in St. F.X. and Cape Breton on the road.

They close the first half with a weekend set at Memorial.

"We had a rough start," said Haywood. "We’re playing top-10 teams in Cape Breton and St. F.X. We didn’t come out soft."

Quackenbush said the Huskies aren’t young, but they have more new pieces to put together than some of the teams they’ve been playing.

"We’ve had a lot of work to do," he said. "We can get a lot better."

Fassett had 18, Harry Ezenibe 16, Harris 14 and Marr 10 for the Huskies. Ezenibe had a game-high 11 rebounds.

Joe Schow had 15, Leighton 14 and Sandy Veit 10 for Dalhousie. The Tigers close the first half Friday at UNB.

This page last modified Thursday, 19-Apr-2012 10:36:14 ADT