UIdaho basketballers enjoy life in Big Sky

As a gangly 6-foot-9 freshman basketball player in 2013, Ty Egbert saw the Western Athletic Conference as a valuable athletic classroom, a post-oriented league where he could roll up his sleeves and hone his skills. “It was a lot more big-boy basketball,” the University of Idaho junior recalled. His older, weightier teammates “were always big-boying me, and I thought, ‘This is what I’d like to do.’ ” Three years later, Egbert is adjusting to the faster, breezier rhythms of the Big Sky Conference, where last year the Vandals moved all their sports except football, re-establishing ties to a league they’d fled in 1996. Egbert believes the transition has made him a better athlete. Meanwhile, like other members of the UI men’s and women’s basketball teams, he thinks the more intimate, regional feel of the Big Sky has lightened his load a bit. No matter what position you played, life in the WAC was getting rugged when the Vandals left, especially in terms of travel/ Dale Grummert , Lewiston Tribune. More here.