Published: November 20, 2009 12:00 am         

Another Challenge for Indiana State as Rams visit Hulman Center

TERRE HAUTE — Another day, another Challenge for the Indiana State men’s basketball team.

This time it’s the inaugural Mountain West-Missouri Valley Conference Challenge as ISU plays host to Colorado State tonight at Hulman Center.

The game is the midway point of a punishing stretch in ISU’s schedule. The game against the Rams was wedged into ISU’s four-game Preseason NIT commitment as the Sycamores head to Western Kentucky for games against Coastal Carolina and Western Kentucky on Monday and Tuesday in the NIT’s consolation round.

Add in ISU’s road game at Arkansas State on Nov. 28 and the Sycamores are in the midst of a punishing seven games-in-16 days stretch at four different sites.

ISU coach Kevin McKenna is doing what he can to mitigate the fatigue factor for the Sycamores.

“We’ve tried to back off practice the last few days. We were off Wednesday, and Thursday will be a light day, almost just a walk-through. Friday will be game day,” said McKenna after ISU’s victory over Wisconsin-Milwaukee at LSU on Tuesday.

While McKenna is adjusting the practice schedule accordingly, he isn’t overwhelmingly concerned with fatigue.

“Our guys are pretty resilient, we have good depth, and as long as guys keep producing, we can utilize that depth,” McKenna said.

McKenna has long been a supporter of the MWC-MVC Challenge. The Challenge was announced last season and Missouri Valley and Mountain West teams were paired for the first time this season.

Because of pre-existing scheduling conflicts at schools in both leagues, this season’s MWC-MVC Challenge schedule is haphazard, with games beginning last week [Bradley lost at BYU] and ending in December. In future seasons, both conferences are blocking out a specific time period to make the Challenge more like those between the Big Ten and Atlantic Coast and the Pac 10 and Big 12 Conferences.

“We got into [the Preseason NIT] really late, so we kind of sandwiched this game in there. [The Preseason NIT] is a good tournament to be involved in, but so is the Mountain West Challenge. It’s a great thing for our league, it guarantees us a home game against a quality opponent every other year,” McKenna said.

The matchup brings together two former friendly adversaries. McKenna and Colorado State coach Tim Miles coached against each other at the Division II level earlier in the decade.

“[Miles] is a friend of mine, I used to coach against him in the old North Central Conference [when McKenna was at Nebraska-Omaha and Miles was at then-Division II North Dakota State]. They put in some of our offense there, the spread stuff, he liked it when we ran it against them. They’re running some of it now, not all of it. It’ll be interesting to play against them, they’re kind of up-and-coming like us,” McKenna said.

If 2-1 ISU is to have success against the 2-1 Rams, it must continue its good defensive play and drastically improve its rebounding. ISU held both LSU and Wisconsin-Milwaukee at or under 35 percent shooting on Monday and Tuesday. At the other side of the coin, ISU has been outrebounded by an average margin of 5.3 boards per game so far.

Rebounding is a concern regardless of the foe, but it’s especially disconcerting for ISU considering that Colorado State forward Travis Franklin (7.3 rpg), forward Andy Ogide (6.3) and guard Dorian Green (5.7) have all been effective on the glass in the Rams’ three games so far. By contrast, Carl Richard and Rashad Reed are ISU’s rebounding leaders at 3.7 per game.

“It’s a testament to our guys buying into defense. Now if they can buy into the rebounding part, we’ve got something. We can score some points, we have versatility there, if we can just get rebounding under control that’s when we’ll become a really good team,” McKenna said.