Nov. 5, 2008

Basketball season will tip-off in just a few days and Santa Clara's first contest is an exhibition with CSU Monterey Bay on Fri., Nov. 7 at 7 pm at the Leavey Center.

Coach Keating will blog about the season throughout the year. Below is his second installment.

As is the case with all exhibitions, it's more about us than the other team and we will certainly use the exhibition to get our new guys experience. This year's team is so young, so this will give them the chance to play with uniforms and lights on.

We are excited about our season and we are working hard together in practice. The guys are definitely at the point where they want to see other faces and another uniform to play against. They are tired of suffering the consequences in practice when they don't win and the other half of their team does.

Every guy on our roster, in his own way, has shown improvement in school and in workouts since the first day, but we all understand we are by no means anywhere ready to play yet. This will be a good test to see where we are at as we continue to get ready to play CSU East Bay on Nov. 14.

Having a team that is limited in numbers with only 10 players on scholarship -- it's been imperative that we take care of our bodies and continue to focus on our strengths. We also have to focus on our conditioning and hopefully that will continue over into our season.

Our schedule has shaped up to be fairly formidable one with potential post-season predictions for teams like UAB, Arizona, UTEP, UNLV, Belmont and Montana, in addition to the top three teams in our league: San Diego, Saint Mary's and Gonzaga. We hope that this season will prove to be a valuable one for us not just in trying to help John Bryant and Calvin Johnson have a successful senior campaign, but also in the continued establishment of how our program will be in the future.

Go Broncos!