The start of the season for the Nicholls State men’s basketball team is about a month away, and the schedule this year features a final four team from last year, a past SEC tournament champion and a perennial Big XII power.
“The reason our schedule is the way it is is because we are trying to get our program to where other schools are,” Piper said.
Nicholls will start its season Nov. 11 at Mississippi State. That same day they will travel to Seattle to participate in the Basketball Travelers Classic on Nov. 12-14 hosted by the University of Washington.
After the tournament in Washington, the Colonels’ next two games will be against LSU and Texas, two teams that faced each other last year for a berth in the Final Four. The next three games are against Ole Miss, Auburn and Centenary, which makes nine-straight away games before the Colonels play their first home game of the season against North Texas on Dec. 2.
The North Texas game will be the first of two back-to-back home games for Nicholls with the second game against Xavier on Dec. 11.
Piper and his team will travel two more times to Nashville to play Lipscomb and Vanderbilt, then they will travel to Monroe to face Louisiana-Monroe before the start of conference against Stephen F. Austin.
Piper said he schedules the way he does because he wants his team to be prepared for conference play.
“You can go out and schedule teams from some unknown conference and get a couple of wins, but that doesn’t guarantee that your team will be ready for when it counts,” Piper said. “My main concern is to get the players ready for the most important time of the season, and that’s conference.”
Piper said he believes scheduling these games against the more elite programs in the country will give his players the motivation to get better and not get outplayed by other teams.
“At times in the past, we may have gotten embarrassed by other teams because we weren’t trying to get better,” he said. “Now we focus on getting better to prevent ourselves from getting outperformed in games.”
Piper has a number of veteran players returning to the team this year, therefore, he said he made the schedule harder.
“I’m excited because I believe this team is far better than it was last year, which is why we made such a tough schedule,” Piper said.
He also said this is an opportunity for his players to travel and face teams they may have never played.
“For some of these players, it’s a dream to play in some of the places that we’re going,” Piper said.
As for the Colonels this year, Piper said his team possesses a good sense of unity but still needs to work on getting experience for players at new positions.
“These guys really seem to enjoy one another, and they play together as one unit,” he said. “Still, there are areas such as the post where we could get exposed, and that could hurt us down the road.”
Piper said his team is becoming accustomed to playing much tougher opponents during the season. He said he is starting a process of making Nicholls basketball a championship-caliber team.
“If you told me we would go 0-11 in the first part of the season but play for a conference championship, I’d sign on the dotted line right now,” Piper said. “We have to start now, putting it in the player’s minds that we can win a championship and get to the NCAA Tournament.