Louisville men’s basketball fell 57-47 to Division II Lenoir-Rhyne on Sunday in coach Kenny Payne’s debut at the helm of the Cardinals’ program.

  • Jae’Lyn Withers led Louisville with 20 points and 10 rebounds. No one else on the team scored in double-digits as the Cardinals shot 29.2 percent from the field.
  • Lenoir-Rhyne outscored Louisville 31-19 in the second half.
  • The Cardinals committed 16 turnovers, giving up 15 points off of them, compared to Lenoir-Rhyne’s eight.

Louisville will play an exhibition game against Chaminade, another DII school, on Thursday before opening regular-season play against Bellarmine on Nov. 9.

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Backstory

Louisville announced in March it had hired Payne on a six-year contract through the 2027-28 season. A forward for Louisville from 1985 to 1989, Payne has previously been an assistant coach with the New York Knicks, Kentucky and Oregon.

He replaced Chris Mack, whose tenure ended in January after three-plus seasons. Louisville went 13-19 last season, ending the year with a loss in the ACC tournament on March 9.

Payne most recently spent two seasons as an assistant with the Knicks after 10 years on John Calipari’s staff at Kentucky, including six as associate head coach. He was an assistant on the UK team that won a national championship in 2012.

What they’re saying

Before taking questions at his postgame news conference, Payne said the loss would help the team move on from issues that arose before he was hired.

“We needed this. We needed this whooping. We needed this loss because there is something that happened to this program, before I got here, that hadn’t been healed yet. And I’m trying to get them to get out of it, to fight through it, to get better — not as a team, but as individuals first,” Payne said. “And then we can talk about being a good team.”

“Until you overcome your own obstacles, you can’t worry about a team. You can’t worry about an opponent. It’s the lesson of life: If I’m depressed, how am gonna I worry about the guys I’m in the battlefield with? I’m depressed. If I’m hurting, if I don’t have confidence, how can I worry about anybody else other than me? That’s what we’re fighting through. And we learned a valuable lesson.”

Required reading

(Photo: Jim Dedmon / USA Today)