Meyer on Morris: Let The Games Begin

By: By Paul Meyer

Men's Basketball | 11/3/2014 8:33:00 PM

Moon Township, Pa. - For weeks -- months, really -- the Robert Morris Colonials have relentlessly inched their way toward the beginning of the 2014-15 basketball season.

"Our first conditioning, our first practice, our first scrimmage,'' RMU coach Andrew Toole said, ticking off the steps taken toward the season opener, Nov. 14, against Lafayette at the Charles L. Sewall Center.

Beginning Tuesday evening, however, the Colonials' pace quickens when they play their first, and only, exhibition game against Mansfield. While the exercise doesn't really count, it does have its own accountability factor.

"It's the beginning to figuring out what kind of personality your team has, and it's the next step in the process of getting ourselves ready for real games," Toole said. "It gives guys opportunities to see what it's like to put a uniform on, go through warm-ups, have fans in the stands and play a different opponent. I think when you have a team with as many new faces as we do, Tuesday is a really good tool for the coaches.

"I think we're improving. However, I don't know if we've handled our 'first' of anything well. The second time through has been much, much better. So if in theory this is our first game, I'm not sure how we're going to handle it. Either way, hopefully we can build on it and be ready for the one that really counts on our win-loss record.''

So the clock is ticking. The clock is also beginning to tick more loudly, and more quickly, as the start of the season approaches.

Tuesday's game is important in another area. It's the first time sophomore point guard Kavon Stewart will start a college "game." It's his first opportunity to run the show from the opening tip, and everybody knows how crucial it is to have quality play at the point guard position.

"I think he's been one of our most consistent guys in practice,'' Toole said. "The difference from 365 days ago to today in terms of the way he approaches practice, the rapport he has with his teammates, is huge. He's a competitive guy. There are times he still gets frustrated, but they're much more infrequent. I think he's done a really nice job. He's playing with good confidence. He's making good decisions. It will be nice to see what it looks like when he gets into a full-game flow.''

The Mansfield game also will give the Colonials an opportunity to improve on two things. Or at least see where they are in that regard.

"There are two things with our team right now that we're lacking a little bit,'' Toole said. "One of them is urgency, the consistent urgency of the importance of every possession. That's probably the easier one to accomplish. The harder one probably is some of the detail that you need whether you're executing offense or you're executing defense. Those two things are what we're trying to focus on the most.

"Tuesday could be a great learning tool because I think one of the reasons we might not have as much urgency or as much attention to detail as we need is because we don't have a great understanding of why we need to be urgent.''

The Colonials, who had great success last season by switching to a zone defense a third of the way through their schedule, will play both zone and man-to-man against Mansfield.

"We want to make sure we get a chance to see what both of them look like and what could work better for us,'' Toole said. "There are some things that maybe we do sometimes in practice our guys are pretty good at exploiting that maybe an opponent might not be as good at.''

Toole said the only sure starters Tuesday night are senior Lucky Jones, junior Stephan Bennett and Stewart.

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"There are some other spots we're still trying to work through each day to try to figure out what those lineups might look like,'' Toole said. "We're still looking at some different rotations, so we'll see. There's still some time to figure that out.''

While the assumption generally is that all the Colonials will play against Mansfield, that might not be the case.

"We have 40 minutes,'' Toole said. "We have 200 minutes to give out. Some guys aren't going to play. We have two hours a day for guys to earn the opportunity to go into the game.''

The Division II Mansfield Mountaineers, who compete in the PSAC East, were 8-18 last season, including 6-10 in the league. Coach Rich Miller, entering his 10th season as the head coach, returns standout forward Joe Bell, a 6'6" senior who last season averaged 21.8 points per game. In his career, Bell has 1,459 points and 587 rebounds. The Mountaineers last season averaged 74.7 points per game and allowed 80.4 points per contest.

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