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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – The Nova Southeastern men's basketball team (9-12, 6-4 SSC) will finish its out-of-conference schedule Saturday at home against the Palm Beach Atlantic Sailfish (8-13) at 4 p.m. The game will broadcast live on 640 Sports.
NSU will look to avenge a loss earlier in the season against PBA, 88-69. The loss was one the Sharks' worst of the season and the bottom point to a rough start to the year. The loss put NSU at 4-10, but the Sharks have gone 5-2 since the loss.
"If our guys approach this game the way they approached the previous game with PBA, they'll probably get the same result: an old-fashioned butt kicking," said head coach Gary Tuell. "PBA should have gotten our players' attention and earned their respect with the way they handled us back in early January. I would hope we're better prepared mentally and emotionally than we were the first time we played. On the other hand, it's a long season. Former North Carolina coach Dean Smith said, 'If you make every game life and death, you're going to die a lot.' I don't want to say the game is meaningless. All games are useful and can be opportunities to learn and improve as a team. But whenever you play a non-conference game in the middle of your conference schedule, it's human nature for the players to relax, to approach these game with a different mentality than they would for the life-and-death battles they face in league play.
"As coaches, we try to take that pressure off them for games like this, give them a chance to relax and have some fun. We have been in a dogfight in every league game. We started the league 0-2 and fought and scratched our way into second place. We're trying to hold onto second place, so every night we play a Sunshine State Conference game we're playing for something meaningful. Relevant to significance, this game against PBA is a screen door on an igloo. It has no meaningful purpose relevant to what we're trying to accomplish as a team. When we sat down as a team at the start of the year and discussed our goals, we talked about finishing in the top three in the league, knocking off one of the nationally ranked top 5 non-conference teams on our schedule and upsetting Division 1 Florida International at their place. But I don't recall any of our players jumping to their feet and shouting, 'BEAT PBA' as a team goal."
NSU currently sits in a tie with Tampa and Barry in second place in the SSC, but will slip to third place if either team wins on Saturday. The coaching staff has the unenviable decision of resting key players or putting emphasis on momentum going into the last six games of the year.
"It would be nice to win and have a little momentum going back into conference play Wednesday against Lynn," said Tuell. But win or lose against PBA, I suspect our guys will play hard against Lynn or any other Sunshine State game left on our schedule. The trick is getting them to play hard against PBA when they know there is nothing much gained from winning or lost in losing."
Does pride enter into the picture at all? Do the players remember the loss at PBA, and if so, will it motivate them to play harder this time around?
"Well, sure," admitted Tuell. "I hope so. They know their effort and their execution at PBA was not good. Our poor play definitely contributed to PBA playing well. But we don't want to take anything away from their team or their coaches. They out-coached us, out-worked us and out-played us last time. So we all remember that. There are a number of reasons they beat us so badly in our first meeting, but let's start with the fact that PBA is good. They've beaten Lynn, they've beaten Eckerd, they've beaten Paine College (a team that beat NSU), and they've beaten us. And they've played a whole bunch of very close competitive games on the road against our league.
"They have several advantages going into this game, including the confidence that comes with winning the first meeting. You also can't overlook that PBA hasn't played this week. They've had the entire seven days to prepare for our game on Saturday. That's a huge benefit for them. On the other hand, we had the little matter of a conference game against Eckerd on Wednesday night that drained our guys. We spent the first part of the week preparing for Eckerd. We gave our guys a much-deserved day of rest on Thursday, so we had just one day, Friday, to prepare for PBA. That shows you how unfair it is to ask our guys to play their best in a non-conference game Saturday. PBA has a week to prepare for us and we have a day to prepare for them. Making this a life-and-death game would be madness on our part."
Coach Tuell was asked to reflect further on the past game against PBA:
"PBA was at home, they did a great job of getting a big crowd for the game, and their kids responded to the crowd and the moment and played extremely well. Don't take anything away from PBA. They did their jobs and they worked hard to pack the stands for that game.
"But we were not a good basketball team at that time. Coming off the Christmas break, we had played poorly in a loss at Eckerd, played poorly but managed to pull out a win at Lynn and then went to PBA and played our worst 30 minutes of basketball this year. With 10 minutes to play, I put our freshmen and walk-ons in to finish the game because it was obvious our top five or six guys were not mentally or emotionally engaged. I think a lot of what was going on can be attributed to the NCAA Division II rule regarding 'Life in Balance.' The rule requires all DII athletes and teams to take seven days off around Christmas in December. No games. No practice. Guys are not even allowed to come in the gym and work out on their own. It's ridiculous. The rule only impacts men's and women's basketball and swim teams and believe me, our guys hate that rule.
"Can you imagine taking seven full days off in the middle of any other team's schedule? Why don't they take seven days off in the middle of the football season? Just shut everything down for a week. Or in the middle of baseball season. I doubt seriously that NCAA golfers sat at home for seven days and didn't go to the practice range or a golf course somewhere and hit balls or play rounds. What lesson are we trying to teach kids? That it's okay … in the middle of your busiest and most important time of your sport season … to walk away from your team and your responsibilities as a student-athlete and take a seven-day siesta? For basketball players, that's equivalent to CPA's shutting down their offices for seven days in March, in the middle of tax season, and doing nothing. It doesn't happen. The very idea would be ridiculous. Our society was built on hard working people, not on laziness and shirking responsibilities. In the middle of tax season CPA's are working 18 hours a day. There's a time to work and a time to rest, but I don't know anywhere in our society where we think it's okay to rest in the middle of our most demanding work season. Rest should come after the season, not in the middle of it. When we came back from that seven-day break it took us a long time to get our competitive edge back. It was very difficult to refocus and get our guys back into a groove. I think the way we played after that break reflected our mindset at the time. We had lost our focus. We had lost our edge. PBA played very well against us, and for whatever reason the layoff didn't seem to bother them, at least not on that day, not at home, not playing in front of a big crowd of supporters. But we were in the throes of playing some very bad basketball."
This game serves as the last run through before NSU looks to stay on the top side of the standings. Although NSU is in second place, the Sharks are only two games ahead of eighth place. Staying in good form will be crucial, regardless of the stakes Saturday.
"Hopefully we will play a little better this time around," hoped Tuell. "But we're not going to approach this game the way we would a conference game. We'll look to play some of the young guys a little more, work on some different things, try to play better than we did the last time we met. In the future we have to look at the wisdom of scheduling non-conference games in the middle of our conference schedule. It's possible we'll stop doing that. If the league expands, which I think it will, then there won't be room for non-conference games during the league schedule anyway. Maybe next year we'll look to play PBA once in December and once during our conference schedule. Or maybe just limit it to one game each year. A day off right now would do a lot more to help our team than playing a non-conference game this time of the year. We have to do what's best for our guys in the future.
"
Brian Cahill (Jr., Arlington, Va.) will not play again on Saturday. We held him out of the Eckerd game and we'll hold him out of the PBA game. If
Casey Carroll (So., Youngstown, Ohio) and
Brandon Patchan (Fr., Tampa, Fla.) continue to play at the level they performed at against Eckerd, then we will be fine until Brian can come back."
Tune into 640 Sports 15 minutes before the game for the pregame show. Fans can watch the game live HERE and follow live stats HERE.
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