Centre Daily Times | Nittany Lions take on Lock Haven:
“At a coaches’ meeting after the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament in April, Dave Odom of South Carolina suggested the coaches whose teams hadn’t filled up their schedules for the following season congregate in one corner of the room to see if they could work anything out.
“‘I went over because we were just about filled, but just in case,’ Penn State men’s basketball coach Ed DeChellis recalled this week. ‘It was like, everybody that you didn’t want to play all standing around in the corner. So we just adjourned and left. But there were probably 30 guys just standing around all still needing games.’
“A perplexing, frustrating and unavoidable part of college basketball, scheduling can determine which teams are in or out of postseason tournaments, build or destroy a young team’s confidence and bolster or hinder ticket sales.
“And it doesn’t always go according to plan, which explains why the Nittany Lions will entertain Division II Lock Haven at the Bryce Jordan Center at 7:30 tonight.
” ‘Scheduling is very, very hard,’ DeChellis said. ‘I don’t know what it is, but it gets harder every year.’
“DeChellis, assistant Kurt Kanaskie, director of basketball operations Eldon Price and athletic director Tim Curley are responsible for lining up about a dozen non-conference games each season. Among the many factors considered are geography, strength of the opponent, strength of one’s own team and perhaps the most important, whether or not a visit must be returned.
“Fresh off an 83-80 win at Rutgers, the Nittany Lions (4-2) haven’t played a team from a Division II school since facing Juniata in 1989, but will do so tonight because a pair of teams, which DeChellis said he was not permitted to name, stood them up.”