Centre Daily Times: Nittany Lions face hostile enviroment:
“Marlon Smith remembers his first.
“It was The Pit, a raucous 15,000-seat arena in Albuquerque, N.M. For Penn State’s then-freshman guard, it was overwhelming.
“‘I was so nervous,’ Smith recalled. ‘And that was like my first time ever being nervous in a long, long, long time. That was a tough place to play.’
“You’re not a college basketball player until you’ve faced your first hostile environment, and the current Penn State freshmen will encounter their first at 7:30 tonight when the Nittany Lions (3-2) visit Rutgers (2-0).
“The Louis Brown Athletic Center, more fondly known as ‘The RAC’ is a cozy, 8,000-seat venue in Piscataway, N.J., acoustically similar to Rec Hall, the Nittany Lions’ former home, a place the Big East’s best fear and where young teams can look even younger.
“‘It’ll be a tough environment,’ Penn State men’s basketball coach Ed DeChellis said. ‘I’m going to see how (the freshmen) react and how they respond. The environment we see (tonight) will be very similar, if not even more substantial than the environments we’ll see in the Big Ten.'”