COURT SESSION: INDIANS FACE TOUGH TEST IN OVC OPENER

This is a very important week for our basketball team. Thursday night's game at Tennessee Tech is our biggest to this point in the season because it is a conference game and because it is our first road game.

A win would give us a big lift at the start of the conference season against another team that could contend for the Ohio Valley Conference title. It is early in the season, so a loss wouldn't necessarily hurt us in the long run, but a win would sure do a lot for the confidence of our basketball team.

As a coach, you are always worried about how your team is going to play on the road. Last season, we started our OVC season with road wins at Austin Peay and Tennessee State and that started us on the way to a tremendous OVC road record of 8-1. In fact, we won more OVC games on the road than we won at the Show Me Center. But that was last season.

With only three returning players from last year's team, we just don't know how the team will respond on the road. I know we have to have great practices this week and we have to go to Tennessee Tech knowing we can win there.

I thought Saturday night's game at the Show Me Center was a tremendous early season game. Montana came in well prepared and played with great intensity, and our team matched that intensity and emerged with a 66-61 victory.

Brian Bunche gave us great effort and I thought our whole team fed off his energy. Brian played great defense against their top player, had eight offensive rebounds and seemed to get every loose ball. It was a tremendous effort by a senior who played with a reckless abandon and left everything on the floor.

Another senior, Roderick Johnson, had his usual solid game and led us in scoring with 15 points. Roderick does a great job of playing within himself. He doesn't take bad shots and he plays solid defense. You can expect him to get 11 or 12 points and at least six rebounds per game. He is our Mr. Consistency.

After three games, Roderick is shooting 82 percent from the field and 78 percent from the line. He must have read one of those pre-season magazines that tabbed him as the best shooter in the OVC.I like the fact that we have different players step up each game. In our five games, including the exhibition games, we have had four different players lead us in scoring. I expect that to continue as this team appears to be very balanced.

Tennessee Tech has a very good basketball team and we will need a great effort to win. They have excellent guards in Corey Hemphill and Josh Heard and they have 11 players who are all playing at least 10 minutes per game. They had a very good recruiting year and many of those new players are playing key roles for them.

We're off to the best start we've had since I've been at Southeast and we want to build on that with two wins this week. It's nice to be 3-0, but we still have so much work to do and so many things to improve on. Saturday night, we will be back at the Show Me Center to go against Oakland City. Hopefully I'll see you there.

Gary Garner is the head men's basketball coach at Southeast Missouri State University