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Racers Earn All-Ohio Valley Honors

Racers Earn All-Ohio Valley Honors
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By MSU Athletics
Mar. 03, 2015 | MURRAY, KY
By MSU Athletics Mar. 03, 2015 | 01:46 PM | MURRAY, KY
The Ohio Valley Conference honored Cameron Payne, Jarvis Williams and head coach Steve Prohm with end-of-season honors Tuesday after a vote of the league's head coaches and sports information directors.

Payne was named OVC Player of the Year and Prohm was OVC Coach of the Year, while Williams earned a spot on the All-OVC First Team along with Payne.

After being OVC Freshman of the Year and then OVC Preseason Player of the Year in 2014, Payne followed it up as the second Murray State player to be named MVP as a sophomore. Payne joins Popeye Jones who was a rising sophomore just like Payne is in the 1989-90 season. Payne is the 18th MSU MVP and the 13th different player. He's the first Racer to win the award since Isaiah Canaan who won it twice in 2011-12 and 2012-13.

Payne, from Memphis, enters this week's OVC Tournament 13th nationally with 20.2 points per game. He's 21st in assists (5.7) and 39th in steals (1.9). He has zoomed past the 600-point mark this season and became the second-fastest MSU player to 1,000 points. Not yet half way through his MSU career, Payne is on pace to make a serious run at Jeff Martin's all-time scoring mark of 2,484 points. Payne has three 30-point scoring games this season and all have come on the road. His 33-point performance at Eastern Illinois (Jan. 22) set his career high. Payne has a 10-rebound game this season against Eastern Kentucky (Jan. 29) and a pair of nine-assist games against Alcorn State (Dec. 17) and Tennessee State (Jan. 17). He has been named OVC Player of the Week five times this season.

Williams, out of Macon, Ga., has been one of the best rebounders in MSU history averaging 9.2 rebounds and grabbing 586 rebounds which ranks him second among two-year players. A year after leading the nation in field goal percentage, Williams is still scoring at 57 percent clip. Williams also ranks sixth at MSU with 24 career double-doubles and has 10 this season. Williams has been a force in the OVC at the free throw line where he has made 120. He set his career high with 28 points (Nov. 18) at Middle Tennessee and had a career high 18 rebounds last season as he set the CFSB Center record in win over Southeast Missouri.

Prohm picked up his second OVC Coach of the Year honor and first since his Racer rookie season in 2011-12. In an amazing transformation, Prohm guided a team that was in a slump coming out of Thanksgiving into one that just ran the table to go 16-0 in the OVC and win 24 straight games. This is the first MSU team to go undefeated in OVC play and just the fifth in 67 years of OVC hoops. The 24-game win streak broke the record that was set in Prohm's rookie season in 2011-12 when the Racers started the season 23-0. Prohm is the sixth different Murray State coach to win a pair of OVC Coach of the Year Awards; overall the program has had 10 different coaches take home the league's top honor, doing so a total of 16 times. Recently, Prohm became the fastest coach in Murray State's prestigious history to reach 100 wins. He enters the postseason with a 101-27 (.789) records in four years at MSU.

The Racer duo of Payne and Williams and head coach Steve Prohm are part of an outstanding season in which the Racers enter the OVC Tournament as the top seed.

On Monday, MSU entered the USA Today Coaches Poll at No. 24 and No. 25 in the Associated Press Poll. It's the first time the Racers have been ranked since the 2011-12 season.

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