MACOMB — It is early in the basketball season but Western Illinois has made a strong case in the first month of the season that it is going to be a contender in the Summit League when conference play opens at the end of December.
The Leathernecks are off to a 6-2 start, winning games against quality competition and doing it in different ways.
On Wednesday night, it was the shooting of Colton Sandage (career high 33 points) leading the way as the Leathernecks topped Ball state 93-80.
While Sandage put on a show Wednesday, it has not been him carrying the load as WIU’s starting five and bench have had moments in the sun.
“If we can get that whole starting five plus more going, we’re very hard to deal with,” Sandage said.
Last week, WIU played a brutal stretch of three road games in five days, going 1-2.
The Leathernecks returned home and kept busy, handing Miami Ohio its first loss of the season on Saturday, then knocked off another MAC school, Ball State, on Wednesday.
Not only is the winning having a positive effect on the squad, but so is the way the Leathernecks are getting it done, playing their brand of basketball and making strides each game.
“I know the confidence is high, the understanding is even better of what we need to do, I like the fact it’s not just one guy one night, it could be another a different night,” WIU coach Rob Jeter said. “Sometimes we have some inside play, we seem to pick each other up and have a next man up mentality and that’s really important.”
Western has another tough stretch ahead of it, hosting UT-Martin on Saturday afternoon, then making a long trip to Mount Pleasant, Michigan, to take on Central Michigan the next afternoon.
For players though, they embrace the challenge of the schedule and look forward to seeing what they are made of.
“It’s great, we have games back-to-back-to-back days and everything we learned in the spring and summer, we don’t have time to come up with a whole scouting report and lock it all in so we’re staying solid and doing everything we learned all spring and summer,” Sandage said.
For Jeter, learning and playing on the fly shows a maturing team that can handle what is placed in front of it and makes this trip one he looks forward to, hoping to see what his team learned from its last difficult trek out of town.
“Hopefully we learned that the mental side is sometimes more than the physical side,” the coach said. “I thought we were physically able to compete but mentally, we’re missing some layups, we’re missing some plays so hopefully they learn from that and we keep our minds sharp because we’ve done this before, so let’s do it again.”
— Scott Holland