Published: October 28, 2008 11:21 pm         

MVC, Mountain West agree to challenge series

St. Louis — The most newsworthy cat of Missouri Valley Conference media day wasn’t supposed to come out of the bag on Tuesday, but it escaped during a coaches’ news conference.

The Missouri Valley and Mountain West Conferences have initiated a conference challenge series that will begin during the 2009-10 season. The league didn’t want to make the Mountain West/Missouri Valley Challenge announcement on Tuesday, but it was accidentally mentioned by Bradley coach Jim Les during a news conference and the Valley confirmed it minutes later.

The challenge will be like the Big Ten-ACC Challenge as selected schools from one conference will travel to another. The league said it hopes to agree on a four-year commitment starting in 2009, though that timeline is not yet confirmed.

MVC Commissioner Doug Elgin said that the league has been trying for five or six years to get a challenge off the ground. Conference USA and the Atlantic were bandied about as possible partners at one time. In the end, the idea of the MVC and the Mountain West was voted on by the coaches in May, the administrators during the fall, and was approved in principle by the Mountain West earlier this month.

“Since the start of Bracket Buster, we thought we’d be well-served to have a challenge of sorts with another league. It’s difficult to get going because you’re always running into the notion that one league things its playing down to face another,” Elgin said. “We tried to get various agreements, doubleheaders for example, but never got traction on it. Finally, we were able to come to this agreement.”

Details of the matchups are not yet known. With 10 Valley schools and only nine in the Mountain West, one Valley team will be left out on a yearly basis.

“In theory, the 10th seed from the [MVC] conference tourney will be the team that isn’t matched up with one of the Mountain West teams, but that still has to be worked out,” Elgin said. “We have a lot of logistical issues to work out. The challenge will be working around exam periods, regularly scheduled games, exempt tournaments. We are confident we can get things worked out.”

Another challenge is television. ESPN has the first right to Valley games, the Mountain West has a contract with CSTV.

Aside from exposure in different markets, one advantage for league members is that the challenge will take one more open date off the schedule, a Godsend for Valley teams that struggle to find home-and-home series with large conference schools.

“I like it. I think the Mountain West is a strong league, like ours. It’ll be a tough travel thing to get to places like Laramie, Wyoming and Provo, Utah, but it’s still an exciting thing for the league. It has to be good with some of the basketball names that are out there,” ISU coach Kevin McKenna said.

The Mountain West consists of Air Force, BYU, Colorado State, New Mexico, San Diego State, TCU, UNLV, Utah and Wyoming.

“The Mountain West is a good conference and very similar to us in many ways. It gives our fans a chance to see teams they don’t regularly get to see,” ISU Director of Athletics Ron Prettyman said. “I think it’s a great thing for our conference and for scheduling. Being a good mid-major, it’s hard for us to get teams in our building. This gives us a guaranteed, good team every other year in our building.”

n Tough non-conference awaits — Visits from Kansas State and 2007 WNIT champion Marquette highlight ISU’s home non-conference women’s schedule.

“I think our non-conference schedule is much tougher than the one we played last year,” ISU women’s coach Jim Wiedie said. “You’ve got two teams potentially that are probably going to be in the Top 25 in Marquette and Kansas State. Marquette won WNIT last year.”

ISU also plays usual intra-state rivals Butler and Ball State in addition to Eastern Illinois across the state border. EIU is picked to win the Ohio Valley Conference.

“I really think that the schedule itself is probably a little more challenging than you would like with so many new players,” Wiedie said. “I would feel better if we had this schedule next year. I do think it will prepare us for league play. The last couple years we’ve tried to do a better job of trying to schedule.”

Thanks to upgraded schedules by several programs including Indiana State last season, the MVC women ranked No. 5 in strength of schedule among the conferences and No. 9 in RPI.