DENVER – After playing two of the top 10 teams in Division II prior to a holiday break, the MSU Denver men's basketball team is ready to reboot its season.
"The break has been good for us," first-year coach Dan Ficke said. "It came at the right time. With the changes we've had – new coaches and new players – we've had them working extremely hard since August, and I think that showed up in our last game (a Dec. 17 loss to Colorado School of Mines). We just didn't have it that night.
"The guys have come back with phenomenal energy, and we've really simplified things and gotten back to basics in terms of what we want to do defensively, offensively, rebounding … just focusing on what we want to do and what we want to take away."
MSU Denver hung close for most of its Dec. 9 game with top-five Black Hills State before eventually losing 84-62, then took a tough loss to South Dakota Mines (93-88) the following night. On Dec. 17 against top-10 Colorado School of Mines, the Roadrunners fell into a huge early deficit and lost 106-70.
They'll try to start righting the ship in Saturday's 4 p.m. game against an excellent Chadron State team that is 6-4 overall and is fourth in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference at 3-1.
"We got to see what the best of best in our conference looks like," Ficke said. "And against Black Hills we competed for the majority of the game. Mines was a different story. But hopefully we've learned what it looks like, where we want to go and how hard we need to play to get there. We've had spurts of it, but we haven't gotten to 40 minutes of it."
Isaiah Wyatt leads Chadron State with an average of 16.8 points per game. He also averages 6.2 rebounds and shoots an impressive 46.5 percent from 3-point range (33 of 71). Josh Robinson adds 11.7 points and 9.4 rebounds while shooting 65.4 percent from the field (51 of 78). Both Wyatt and Robinson are 6-foot-6 and transferred to Chadron State this season.
Tyrei Randall leads MSU Denver with 15.6 points per game, while
Caleb McGill adds 14.2 and
Jaden Kennis 10.4. At 4-7 overall and 1-4 in league play, the Roadrunners are hoping to make up ground over the final 17 games of the regular season.
"Our (conference) schedule, to this point, has to have been as tough as anyone's in the league," Ficke said. "You start with the road trip to Westminster and (Colorado) Mesa, and then Black Hills, South Dakota Mines and Colorado School of Mines – that's not an easy five-game stretch. Hopefully it has toughened us up a bit. You always want to be better coming out of Christmas break than you were going into it. We can learn and grow from what we've experienced.
"We want to be consistent in everything we do, and with all the injuries and illness we had before Christmas, consistency has been hard to find. Hopefully we can establish it and move forward with it."
