Issue date: 3/4/10 Section: Sports

Media Credit: Hunter Creel The SIUE men's basketball team finished the season with a record of 5-23. Head Coach Lennox Forrester said this season will serve as a learning experience for a young team in the middle of its transition to NCAA Division I.

SIUE men's basketball Head Coach Lennox Forrester said a successful season in sports is often marked by wins and losses.

By those standards, the 5-23 season posted by the SIUE men's basketball team was unsuccessful, but Forrester thinks about it differently.

He said 2009-2010 was a year marked by progress, as the program has now completed two of four probationary seasons mandated for reclassification into NCAA Division I.

"If you are not playing at 110 percent every night, you are going to be embarrassed like we have. That's a part of it," Forrester said. "There were some nights we lost by 20-something points [to more established schools], and I thought our guys did a pretty good job."

During the course of the season, SIUE was handed its share of blowout losses. The Cougars lost 12 games by more than 20 points and four by more than 30 points, including two against Murray State University, a member of the Cougar's future home, the Ohio Valley Conference. SIUE ended the season ranked No. 318 in the Ratings Percentage Index, out of 347 D-I schools.

Putting aside their record, sophomore forward Mark Yelovich, a preseason first-team All-Independent player and the Cougar's rebound leader (5.9 rpg) and leading scorer (16.3 ppg) said there are positives to take from what was, in a small sense, a championship season: a Drake Hy-Vee championship season.

"We beat a really good Drake [University] team and a good team in [the University of Texas at] Arlington and won the tournament," Yelovich said. "I really don't know what happened to us that weekend."

Following a 10-day break in the schedule and a 57-50 loss at the Vadalabene Center to the University of North Dakota, Feb. 7, the Cougars played well down the stretch, aside from a 78-40 loss to Indiana-University-Purdue University-Fort Wayne Feb. 23.

In the final leg of the schedule in which the Cougars logged 5,800 miles of travel, SIUE knocked off North Dakota by 15 points and came within four points of California State University at Fullerton, their opponent in ESPN's Bracketbuster series. Following the loss to IPFW, SIUE defeated Hannibal LaGrange College to round out the season.

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