Hereafter

[Wayne23]

12/13: 74-69.. Good start. Up 7 with 10 minutes played. Up 10 at the half. Andy is getting it done. They're keeping it close in the 2nd. They got it to one possession 3 times late.

23, 4 for Andy. 12 for King.

-5 RBs. Only 8 TOs to 19.

We shot only 35.8% to their 43.8%. We won it at the line, 34-51 to 16-21.

We're not blowing anyone out but we're winning; the last 3 were by 5, 4, and 2.

Rash Thop has tendinitis, but we have a week off. He'll be back for our next game.

At 4-5 Appalachian State next. They have a very good PG, but not much else.

Jupiter is unimaginably large and we're still some distance away. Many of us, probably nearly all of us are really looking forward to this stop.

[Wayne23]

12/20: 90-85. Up 4 10 minutes in. Tied at the half. Down 7 early in the 2nd. Up 1 with 10 to play. This was a shootout.

All 5 starters had 12 or more. 20, 7 for Rash Thop, 17, 6 for Mill, 18, 3 for Lee.

-9 RBs but 8 TOs to 17. Not happy with the rebounding for the past several games.

One more pre-conf. game, at 7-6 Chicago State after another week off. They're 6-1 at home. They do a lot of things well. They seem to be better outside than inside.

Getting ever closer to the moons of Jupiter.

12/22: We're starting with Europa.

[Wayne23]

12/27: 71-83. They're up 7 after 10 minutes. Down 19 at the half; really getting our butts kicked. Down 22 with 10 to play. This is NOT the way we wanted to head toward conference play! They led by 23 in the middle of the 2nd half and the final score was as close as we came in the last 33 minutes.

14, 8, 3 for Andy. 17 for Thop but he was outplayed by his man, as were Lee and Mill.

-4 RBs (again), 8 TOs to 12. A huge difference was shooting; they shot 51.7%, 7-16 on three, while we shot 37.3%, 3-13 on threes.

The staff is thinking it's best to just turn the page and focus on our AEC opener at 4-8 Vermont. This one looks close but they have a lot of trouble scoring- 63.5 to our 80.5. We don't think they'll be able to score enough to beat us, but it's a road game...

Europa is small, about 1/4 the diameter of Earth. It is known as "the ocean moon," and it has several oceans. We'll never be able to penetrate the miles thick ice above the oceans but we have instruments that we hope will be able to "see" through the ice. We're also going to investigate the thin plumes of very icy water that we can already see shooting out in a few spots.

We've mostly been looking and using our equipment to learn more about what's under all that ice. We'd love to get samples of the plumes, but that is going to be tricky. We're going to send a small vehicle out to hopefully catch some samples. Another small craft is going to land on Europa and get samples from several locations, both on the surface, and a bit below it if the instruments can dig through to do that. Both craft will be robots only, no humans.

[Wayne23]

1/3/2024: 84-77. We can't score. Down 10 after 10 minutes. Down 11 at the half. Down 4 with 10 to play. Hell of a comeback; we were down 22 early.

18, 9 for Rash Thop. 14, 10 for Car Mill. 16, 5 for 6th man Wyatt Bond. Andy didn't do much, which is unusual.

+1 RB, 10 TOs. Shooting was the difference again. We shot 51.9%, they shot 40.7%. But they had way less trouble scoring than we had anticipated, especially in the 1st half (45).

Two guards get slight injuries. #3 guard Pete Robb hurt his hand and is day to day; he may miss a game. #5 guard Tony John hurt his wrist and will miss up to a week. Eufe Miki will be our only available back up guard for at least one game. He hasn't played much and not at all except in garbage time.

Next up is 6-6 Stony Brook here. Their SF is their scorer so Car Mill needs to play some D. Their PG may be their best player. Their bench is good and deep. But they turn it over quite a lot.

The icy water from the plumes came back as icy water, with the same chemical composition of water on Earth. No signs of life- no bacteria in the water, nothing we can't identify. Just water.

The other vehicle is on the surface and having a very difficult time penetrating the surface. None of their instruments could crack through the surface ice so now they're melting it. We'll have results in a few days.

[Wayne23]

1/6: 83-70. We take an early lead. Up 4 after 10. Up 5 at the break. Up 19 with 10 to play. Not as close as the final score made it seem. We led by 24 fairly late.

23, 6 for Car Mill. We challenged him and he stepped up! 16, 4 for Andy, who isn;t hitting the boards as well as we need him to. 15, 5, 5 for Thop, and 12 for sub guard Euf Miki, who looked good.

-10 RBs but 8 TOs to 20. We shot over 50% again.

At 5-8, 1-1 Hartford. We don't think they can rebound with us, IF we rebound as we should, or think we should. Their D seems weak.

The samples from the surface show the same thing as the plumes did, just water. We're going to sample the ice on other parts of the moon, several other locations.

[Wayne23]

1/10: 63-74. Slow start for both teams. Down 3 after 10. Down 2 at the half. Down 2 with 10 to play. We were behind most of the way and then they went on a late mini-run to seal it.

17, 6, 4 for Thop. +9 RBs for all the good it did us. 18 TOs; they had 8.

We shot 39.6% to 46.6%. They beat us inside and from the bench. We have work to do.

7-7, 2-1 UMBC is here next. This is a game we should win. We feel like we're stronger across the board.

We're leaving Europa and going to Io, the most volcanic place in the solar system. It is truly a wild world in every way. We could never land a ship on it but we can do some observation and testing from orbit, as we will.

[Wayne23]

1/13: 89-85. We fall behind early. Then we come back. Up 6 after 10. Up 7 at the break. Down 8 with 10 to play. This one was a struggle, 17 lead changes, 10 ties.

8 players had between 15 and 7 points. Lee probably played best, 11, 7, 5. 14, 2, 3 for Andy who simply is not rebounding most nights. It's a very real problem.

Good ball handling, 10 TOs, and good bench play, and again, good shooting, 51.9%. We're regularly shooting over 50%. But we won this one on the line, 32-43 to 22-30.

At 5-10, 1-3 Binghamton. They REALLY turn it over a lot, 18.4! But it's a road game.

[Wayne23]

1/17: 76-75. Up 11 after 10. Up 9 at the half. They come back; up 4 with 10 left. We barely hung on, mostly because we were not able to turn them over; they had a season low 10.

9 for Pete Andy, 17, 3, 4 for King, 13, 5 for Bond.

+6 RBs. 10 TOs. We shot a lower than usual 46.4% to 44.6%. All of the stats were close and we were lucky to win.

Post Game Press Conference (Excerpts):

Q: Coach Clark, you're 13-3, 4-1, in a 2 way tie for 1st in the AEC, NET #113. Are you pleased with the way things are going?

Coach: I'm pleased with our record. It would be foolish not to be. But we're having to work really hard every night, and aside for scoring points, we're not particularly standing out in any area. We're not very good on D, giving up 75 a game, and something close to #300 in that category. We're near the absolute bottom in free throw shooting and we don't shoot the three well.

Q: You have 6 games left with the top contenders in the league, 3 on the road. Any thoughts?

Coach: I think we need to do a lot of things better than we're doing them now if we're going to finish at or near the top of the AEC.
Next is 7-9, 2-3 Maine, here. We think we're better all around and it would be great to see us play the way I think we can.

(Private thoughts: I wonder if it might be time to move on. If the right offer came I think I'd consider it.)

Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system; it's almost as big as Mars, so it's the size of a small planet. We think it has an ocean under the frozen surface, and we're going to try to find out if it does, and if so, if there's any sort of life in the ocean.

[Wayne23]

1/20: 75-56. Up 19 after 10 minutes. Up 32 at the half. I'm getting that blowout I wanted. Up 27 with 10 to go. A laugher is good once in a while.

16, 11 for Andy. 17, 3, 3 for King, 12, 9 for Mill.

+11 RBs, 11 TOs to 21. We shot only 41.8% but we took 24 more shots.

+22 in the paint, +14 on 2nd chances.

At 11-6, 5-1 NJIT, with whom we're tied for 1st. 2 clear differences on the stat sheet, for whatever that's worth: 1. They turn it over a lot more often than we do. 2. They score 10 fewer per game.

Ganymede isn't showing us any surprises so far.

[Wayne23]

1/24: 72-69. We trail early. Down 5 after 10. Up 3 at the half. Up 3 with 10 to play. Another nail biter but a BIG road win.

17, 5 for Thop, 15, 8 for Andy14 for King.

A big +13 on the boards. But 19 TOs (to 15). Shooting pct. Was essentially even with theirs. We won it at the line, 26 of 36 to 7 of 15. We were better in the paint but their bench was better.

Alone in 1st.

At 9-9, 3-4 New Hampshire next. They have a really good PG; he'll test Del King, who has been doing a good job for us. He's our 3rd leading scorer. NH doesn't score a lot but they have a tight D.

I've started to make a couple of close friends. Four of us have taken up contract bridge. We play against each other and play against virtual opponents in the holo, and we've started hanging out aside from the card playing. Jeff, Noreen, and Lacy are their names. Lacy and I are really hitting it off. She works in plant science, keeping us in food and making sure we have oxygen giving plant life, so our work never brought us together.