2016 Kat men to challenge SMU Saturday night
11/13/2015 11:01:00 PM | Men's Basketball
Sam Houston's young men's basketball squad faces an awesome challenge Saturday when the Bearkats open the 2015-16 season against defending American Athletic Conference champions SMU at Moody Coliseum in Dallas.
The Mustangs went 27-7 last year, spending nine weeks in the AP and USA Today Top 25 and finishing the year No. 18 in the AP Poll.
Picked to successfully defend their conference championship, SMU placed two players – guard Nic Moore and forward Markus Kennedy – on the preseason all-conference first team. Moore was selected by the media as the American Athletic Conference preseason “Player of the Year.”
“Taking on an SMU team that is No. 20 in the preseason national rankings is going to be a tall order,” Sam Houston head coach Jason Hooten said. “They have a lot of guys coming back off that 27-7 team. They're well-coached and their kids are going to be focused coming into their opener.”
The Bearkats expect to be playing in front of a large crowd at Moody Coliseum in Dallas Saturday. Last year SMU set home attendance records, averaging 6,944 fans per contest while going 16-2 in the newly-renovated arenda.
“SMU has a rich basketball tradition. It's going to be a great experience for our team,” Hooten said. “Experience is something we need. Even three of our top four returning players from last year don't have that much experience as starters. Dakarai Henderson averaged 21 minutes a game and both Aurimas Majauskas and Jamal Williams averaged about 14 minutes a game.”
The Bearkats have eight players who will be seeing their first action in an NCAA Division I contest. Five are junior college transfers. Two are red-shirt freshmen and one is a true freshman.
“We've had 28 practices to get ready for SMU,” Hooten said. “We're definitely still a work in progress. What we're looking for Saturday will be a consistent effort from every play. We want to see how the players take what they work on in practice every day carries over into the game.”
Sam Houston has held two scrimmages against outside competition in the past two weeks. Both scrimmages, the Bearkats started different line-ups.
“Early on our starting line-up won't determine how we play the whole game,” Hooten said. “We're going to keep mixing things up, searching for the right chemistry.”
With back-to-back 20-victory seasons, Sam Houston men's basketball has totaled 50 victories the past two years. Those 50 wins stand as the most in any two-year period in the program's 96 years of play. Only once before, in 1972 and 1973 at the NAIA level, has Sam Houston totaled 50 victories in consecutive seasons.
A key to that success was defense. Sam Houston led the Southland Conference in scoring defense and field goal defense last year on the way to a 26-9 record, a runner-up regular season league finish, the finals of the Southland Conference tournament and a second consecutive CollegeInsider.com post-season tournament berth.
“Defense will be our biggest concern,” Hooten said. “We will be looking for improvement game by game. We've been very impressed by the toughness and work ethic of this group. We're going to learn a lot about ourselves with this challenging pre-conference schedule this year.”
Sam Houston will play host to the University of Saint Thomas on Tuesday, November 17, in the Bearkats' home opener at Bernard G. Johnson Coliseum.
Season tickets and individual game tickets for Sam Houston men's and women's basketball are available now online at www.gobearkats.com or at the athletic ticket office located on the west side of Elliott T. Bowers Stadium. The ticket office telephone number is (936) 294-1729.
As a special bonus for Bearkat football customers, a ticket stub from any home 2015 Sam Houston football game is redeemable for a general admission seat at either the Bearkat men's home game with Southern Illinois on Saturday, November 21, or the women's contest with LSU-Alexandria on Monday, November 23.
