While the rest of Denver is celebrating the New Year’s Eve in the final hour of 2016, a bleary-eyed team will load up a bus and travel home together as they’ve done the entire holiday season.
The No. 17 Fort Lewis College men’s basketball team is in the midst of its toughest trip of the season, playing seven of eight games on the road. It’s a brutal stretch, even for a team that has won 11 consecutive games in a highly-competitive NCAA Division II conference while playing at home only three times since Thanksgiving.
If the defending RMAC regular season and conference champion Skyhawks were looking for any gifts this holiday season, Santa Claus must have missed Durango.
“It’s a tough stretch on the schedule; no one ever has to play seven of eight on the road,” FLC head coach Bob Pietrack said.
Still, FLC is the only unbeaten team in the conference at 6-0 and 11-1 overall. The lone 90-82 loss came in the season opener at No. 14 West Texas A&M (14-1).
That perfect mark in conference will be put to the test the next four road games. FLC, fresh off a Division II mandated break Dec. 20-26, had two days of practice before loading the bus Thursday for a 1,269-mile round trip to Chadron, Nebraska, and Denver. FLC will face Regis on New Year’s Eve, with the Rangers (9-3, 3-3 RMAC) still fresh with no game scheduled Friday when FLC faces Chadron State. The Skyhawks will have to travel five hours and another 300 miles to get to Regis.
That’s a dynamic Westminster College of Salt Lake City, Utah, has had to face all season. There are 15 teams in the RMAC, and each team is paired with another as travel partners. Westminster, which is still in the process of transitioning from an NAIA program to Division II, was the lone wolf. Every road trip, the Griffins play a team on a Saturday night that was off the Friday before.
“Personally, I don’t care if you write it, the RMAC scheduling is just horrendous,” Westminster head coach Norm Parrish said after his team’s loss Dec. 17 at Fort Lewis. “We play back-to-back every time and the teams we play don’t.”
Because of Westminster’s transition status, it is ineligible for postseason tournament play until it is fully granted Division II status, so the effect of the schedule has less significance.
This week’s FLC trip to a fresh Regis team is unprecedented in Pietrack’s nearly 20 years with the Skyhawks program as a player, assistant coach and now second year as head coach.
“Since I’ve been at Fort Lewis, we’ve never had one of these on the back-to-backs,” he said. “For whatever reason, we have it this week. We have to make the most of it.”
Pietrack said his team will channel a mantra of Pietrack’s mentor and longtime FLC head coach Bob Hofman, who frequently said, “Great ones adjust.” It’s a quote printed inside the FLC home locker room.
“That’s our rallying cry this week,” Pietrack said.
FLC will then return home for a few days to prepare for perhaps the biggest road game of the conference season at Metro State (8-4, 4-2 RMAC) and will then end the seven in eight stretch at UC-Colorado Springs.
Though the combined record of the teams over this eight-game schedule is only 34-53 and 18-30 in the RMAC, the Skyhawks have received every team’s best shot as the defending champion. The last three wins have all come by fewer than eight points.
“In conference on the road, you can throw records out,” Pietrack said. “The old line is, ‘any road win in conference is a great win.’ It’s true, and games are really close. In this league, the difference between 6-0, 0-6 or somewhere in the middle is a thin line.”
If there is a light at the end of the tunnel, FLC can look forward to playing eight of the final 12 conference games at home. FLC won’t have to make the road trip to South Dakota, and the team with the best attendance in the RMAC the past two seasons will have chance to continue its program-record 24-game home winning streak on Bob Hofman Court at Whalen Gymnasium.
“You play 11 road games and 11 home games in the RMAC,” Pietrack said. “Every time we’re playing a road game, it means we have a home game in the bank coming up. Maybe it will be a blessing to play those later when everyone is back on campus and in town for the games.”
If FLC wants to host the RMAC Tournament and repeat as regular-season champions, the Skyhawks will likely need to go at least 13-3 the rest of the way.
Maybe that’s what the RMAC was trying to prevent.
John Livingston is the Sports Editor of The Durango Herald. He can be reached at jlivingston@durangoherald.com or on Twitter @jlivi2.
