Indiana State snuck up on a lot of people last year, finishing third in the regular season after many picked them to finish dead last in the preseason. Then they went to St. Louis, got hot for a weekend, and won the auto bid to the NCAA Tournament. All of that happened in Coach Greg Lansing’s first year in charge in Terre Haute. When we talked to Lansing at MVC media day last week, he quipped, “My assistants were like, ‘Jeez, you don’t want to be doing that in the first year or they’re going to be expecting it every year!'”
After sneaking up and snatching the auto bid last year, Lansing knows his team is no longer the hunter.
“It was a great ride, but we’ve got to put that behind us too. As a coaching staff, we’re a little uptight. I want to quit getting the pats on the back and get ready for this year. We’re certainly not going to sneak up on anybody. The conference is so loaded and is going to be so good this year that we’re going to have to be at our best.”
As they prepare for 2011-12, Lansing told us that practice has been going well but notes the Sycamores did not take a foreign trip (and the ten early practices that come with it) unlike several of their fellow MVC schools this summer.
“I’m a little nervous, because so many teams in the Valley took foreign trips and got ten days on us with their practices. I really like my group of players, though. Tremendous group of guys, a very hard-working group. In practice, we’ve been making a lot of effort plays, and doing a lot of things right but we have a long, long ways to go to be where we want to be at the end of the year. We really like our returning group, with four seniors that have been in some big games and do a great job for us with leadership.
Having a point guard like Jake Odum makes a big difference on what you do. We do have a lot of new guys, so I have to slow myself down in practice a little bit and remember that they’re not all veterans.”
On their ride a year ago, the Sycamores had excellent balance, and that figures to be the case again this year. They return four starters, three of which averaged more than nine points. One of them is Jake Odum, who averaged 9.3 points and 3.9 rebounds a game — though that only begins to tell the story.
“Jake’s a leader, and an unbelievable competitor. He’s a guy who is going to make things happen for us. We’re expecting great things from him. He took what we accomplished last year and he wants more. He wants to get to the tournament again and win some games. We’ve got three years left with that guy, and I’m excited about that. Being from Terre Haute is a special thing for him. He loves to make Indiana State and Terre Haute people proud. He wants to put us on the map a little bit.”
Odum certainly lifted the level of play from his teammates, as all good point guards do. One of those players was senior Dwayne Lathan, who led the team in scoring at 10.9 points a game last year.
“He’s gotten better since the day he got here. He’s a guy who can really make some things happen on the offensive end. We’ve got to get him to fighting a little bit harder on the defensive end, though.”
Another senior is 6’5″ Carl Richard, who averaged 9.5 points a game and led the team in rebounds with 6.5 caroms a night.
“Carl has basically started every game since he’s been here. He had a bad back late last year, which limited his effectiveness, but he played through the pain. He’s a guy who when you cross the lines, he’s a guy you trust. He knows what we want to do at both ends. He’s going to compete.”
6’8″ center Myles Walker is a third senior starter. Walker averaged 6.5 points and 5.3 rebounds a game last year, but came on strong in March. “The last 10 games of the year, he was as important as anyone we had,” Lansing told us. “He carried us at times. He really stepped up his game.”
They also have one of the nation’s best three-point shooters in Jordan Printy, who made 52-109 (48%) a year ago. “Jordan can really stroke it,” Lansing noted. “He’s going to have a great senior year.”
The Sycamores have lined up a challenging non-conference schedule, which is good news for the league — if the trees can make some noise in November and December, it will help everyone come March. Over Thanksgiving, they play Texas Tech in the Old Spice Classic in Orlando, with possible matchups against Minnesota, Dayton, Wake Forest and Arizona State to follow. They travel to Vanderbilt, a Top 25 team in many preseason polls. And they travel to Boise State in the MVC/MWC Challenge.
Indiana State is picked third in the MVC preseason poll, behind Creighton and Missouri State, so clearly they’re no longer flying under the radar. If they can handle being the hunted instead of the hunter, they should be right back in the thick of the race for a postseason bid.
