With the release of the women’s basketball schedule last Friday, both Bradley basketball teams now know who they’ll face throughout the regular season.
Men’s basketball head coach Geno Ford has compiled a schedule that include back-to-back road games at Memphis and Kansas State as well as a stretch that will take his young and inexperienced team on the road for six of eight games during that time.
“The reality is we wanted to put some sizzle on our schedule,” Ford said. “We wanted to put ourselves on the national stage as much as possible and go into places that our team will get better and learn from.”
Bradley’s men’s roster features seven new players including University of Illinois transfer Mike Shaw, who sat out last season due to NCAA regulations. The team is still waiting for word on the status of senior forward Auston Barnes, who started 31 out of 32 games last season. Barnes is awaiting his status due to his August arrest for domestic battery charges.
The men’s team opens the season with four straight home games, highlighted by Robert Morris (PA.), who, as an eight seed in the 2014 National Invitational Tournament, upset top seed St. John’s.
The men’s team will play two tournaments as part of it’s non-conference schedule. This season, they will partake in the Corpus Christi Coastal Classic. The tournament will feature two games, which will be played in Peoria against North Carolina A&T State University and Texas A&M – Corpus Christi.
After those two games, the Braves will travel to Texas and play Texas Christian University (TCU) and then the winner of St. Louis University and Mississippi State University. The tournament will be over Thanksgiving weekend, Nov. 28-29.
The next tournament the men plays will be during winter break (Dec. 21-22) as the Braves partake in the South Point Holiday Hoops Classic. The teams include University of California- Irvine and University of Wisconsin–Green Bay or University of Arkansas- Little Rock.
Missouri Valley Conference play begins on Dec. 31 with an away game in Chicago against Loyola.
For the women’s basketball team, inexperience will also be tested early on in the season as coach Michael Brooks and his assistants compiled a schedule that most people would question.
The women’s schedule features five straight road games before returning home for eight straight home games including the start of MVC play.
“For us, this is the perfect schedule,” Brooks said. “We’ll go and get tested on the road early and then come back and build that confidence to learn how to defend our Renaissance Coliseum.”
The Braves have a young roster, which includes six freshmen and transfers Charnelle Reed from Western Illinois, Whitney Tinjum from Washington State and Sameia Kendall from Johnson County Community College. Brooks and his team welcome back only three starters from last season, including leading scorer Michelle Young.
“We worked for a long time on this schedule,” Brooks said. “We knew what we were going to have coming into this season and that is a lot of new players and a young group, so we wanted to test them early.”
