THE LATEST Feb. 2, 2010 We have reached the halfway point in conference play. We are coming off a nice win over second-place UC Santa Barbara, which improved our record to 3-5 in the Big West. It’s not the start to league play we would have liked, but I feel like we are headed in the right direction. We put forth a really good 40-minute effort in the win over UCSB. It was clearly the best effort we have had in some time. Throughout the month of January we played some really good basketball ‘in stretches,’ but we were not always able to sustain it for a full 40 minutes. That is something that had to change if we were going to be able to get back into the conference race. We accomplished that against UCSB and now we need a similar effort when we travel to UC Riverside later this week. Thursday’s game is the first of three straight road games. This weekend we visit Long Beach State and next week we travel to Cal State Bakersfield. This is an important three-game stretch because six of our final eight games will be at home, including a non-conference game against Drake. On Monday we learned that we will play host to the Drake Bulldogs in ESPN’s eighth-annual BracketBusters. Drake, which has been to postseason in each of the past two seasons, is a very good team out of the Missouri Valley Conference so it will be another great test for us. Have a great week, Coach Braswell
© 2010 Bobby Braswell. AllCoachNetwork.com, a division of CollegeInsider.com. All rights reserved.