COURT SESSION: PRACTICE A BIG KEY FOR SEMO

It was great to get another Ohio Valley Conference road win Saturday night at Eastern Illinois. I thought our team really played hard. We had great effort by all the starters and the players who came off the bench. Overall, this could have been our best team effort of the season.

I'm a firm believer in the fact that you play the way you practice and last week we had an outstanding week of practice. As a result of our practices and the players' attitude toward practice, we are getting better and that is very important at this point in the season. Some teams don't get much better down the stretch, but championship teams do.

Our players play with great confidence on the road. We had planned to go to Eastern Illinois the day of the game, but after talking to the players, I knew they wanted to go the day before and so we did.

The players feel that, when we are on the road, there are no distractions and they are able to focus completely on the game. We had a good practice at Eastern on Friday night, had our shoot-around Saturday and came out ready to play that night.

We trailed by six at the half at Eastern Illinois, but I told our players at halftime that if they kept their intensity, we would come back and win the game. We started the second half with a 12-2 run to get on top, but the game remained close until the final minutes when we put the game away with great free-throw shooting.

Kahn Cotton is really developing into an outstanding point guard. He had seven assists and no turnovers at Eastern Illinois. In the last five games, he has 30 assists and only five turnovers and that is a tremendous statistic.

Kahn also has great confidence and, along with our other seniors, is providing the senior leadership needed to give this team a chance to win the championship. In the final 1:03 of the game, Kahn was 10-for-10 from the free-throw line.

With Cory Johnson shooting .939 from the line and Kahn hitting .878 from the line, it is difficult for a team to catch us down the stretch by fouling.

Bud Eley had another great game with 19 points, 14 rebounds, four blocked shots and three assists. On defense, he is simply dominating. He had several key blocks in the second half at Eastern Illinois.

I mentioned earlier about how this team practices. One of the reasons is Bud, who practices as hard or harder than anybody else on the team. He is the OVC preseason player of the year, but he is still out there practicing hard to get better. It has a very positive influence on the other players and is one of the keys to our success so far this season.

Mike Branson has developed into one of our most consistent players and Rod Johnson is really coming on with improvement every time out.

Cory Johnson could be the national leader in free-throw shooting this week and he continues to shoot over 40 percent from 3-point range while playing more minutes than any other player.

I thought our bench play was outstanding at Eastern Illinois. Nathan Owen didn't score, but played great defense. He really gets after people and when there is a loose ball, you can expect Nathan to be there.

Fred Abraham played sound defense and got a big basket on the break and Brian Bunche had his best game of the season.

In the second half, I put Brian in at the four (power forward) position to give Rod a break and he played so well, I just left him in there. I like the idea of having both Brian and Bud in the game at the same time in certain situations. They are both big bodies who really go to the boards. Brian's development makes us a better basketball team.

Demetrius Watson saw only limited playing time at Eastern because of a slight hamstring pull, but he should be ready to go this week.

We play at Morehead State Saturday night and the Eagles are 6-2 at home this season. You can remember that we had to come from behind to beat Morehead at the Show Me Center and they played that night without one of their top players. We have our work cut out for us.

We had a lot of great fan support at the Eastern Illinois game and we really appreciate the support. Remember, we have three home games next week: Tennessee State Tuesday night, Middle Tennessee Thursday night and Tennessee Tech Saturday night.

It will be another great week of basketball!

Gary Garner is the head basketball coach at Southeast Missouri State University. His weekly column is sponsored by Rust Communications.