Cougars welcome Eagles
PULLMAN – If Tony Bennett has his way, Washington State’s basketball opener tonight in Beasley Coliseum will be just the first of many meetings with the Eastern Washington Eagles.
“When I was a player at Wisconsin-Green Bay, we were dying to play Marquette or Wisconsin, and we didn’t get that opportunity,” WSU’s head coach said this week. “I think it is a positive thing to play the D-I schools in the state.”
Despite the sentiment, the two schools haven’t played a game since 1998, although that doesn’t mean they haven’t competed.
Because EWU was coached by former WSU assistant Mike Burns, the teams held a preseason closed-door scrimmage the past three years.
“We went against them the last three years, then this year we scheduled them,” Bennett said. “Part of that was when Mike was on the staff, he and my father talked about it and decided, ‘Let’s just scrimmage each other and hold off playing.’ We decided this would be the year (to play a game).”
The 10th-ranked Cougars, who were 26-8 and made the NCAA tournament second round last season, got their first taste of game action last Sunday with an 80-42 exhibition win over NAIA power Lewis-Clark State.
The Eagles also have an exhibition win in hand, 92-49 over Pacific, a NCAA Division III school from Forest Grove, Ore.
“We’re taking baby steps – it’s brick by brick right now,” said Kirk Earlywine, who will make his official Eastern coaching debut. “We’ve spent the last eight or nine days working very, very hard on our defense, and shoring up some of those things.
“I thought we were very sporadic offensively against Pacific, but I think we can manufacture ways to score.”
The Cougars enter the game healthy, but the same can’t be said of the Eagles. Freshman forward Petar Milasinovic hasn’t practiced after rolling an ankle last week, and junior college transfer guard Adris DeLeon has yet to be cleared by the NCAA. Eastern may have as few as seven scholarship players available.
The series dates back 100 years (the first game was played in 1907, when Eastern was still known as Cheney Normal), with WSU holding a 50-11 margin.
The game has been sold out since last week, but it will be televised live in Spokane and around the Northwest.
With it being Dad’s Weekend in Pullman, the day is filled with sporting events, including the women’s soccer team taking on UCLA at 1 p.m., the women’s basketball team facing the University of Portland at 4 and the volleyball squad hosting No. 5 Stanford at 8:30.