There’s no place like home.
Sorry, Dorothy, but one basketball coach prefers to disagree.
He’s Coppin State men’s basketball icon Ron “Fang” Mitchell, and the way he sees it, playing at home is for softies.
Friday night, Mitchell’s team lost at No. 22 Kansas, 85-53, the Eagles’ third straight road contest to begin the season.
Many, many more away games lie ahead.
That’s because Mitchell, in his 23rd season leading Coppin State, routinely organizes arguably the roughest nonconference road schedule in the country.
The Eagles play their first 15 regular-season games of this season away from the Coppin Center in Baltimore.
The biggest curiosity is, why? Why put a team through a brutal schedule in which it cannot play games in front of home fans for nearly two months?
Mitchell said he learned long ago from former Temple University coach John Chaney that a difficult schedule made his players tougher.
“The reality is, I believe the youth of today, they don’t go through a lot of adversity,” said Mitchell, who worked Chaney’s basketball camps as a junior-college coach in the early 1980s. “What I try to do is take our guys through adversity. That will make them stronger in the long run and make them better people in the long run.”
A quick scan of this season’s pre-conference road slate would make most mid-major programs shudder: at Purdue, Kansas, Richmond, Dayton, Wisconsin, Syracuse, Oklahoma, Missouri and a four-game tournament in Honolulu that begins with a game against Colorado.
“I think we’re touring the Big 12, to be honest,” Mitchell joked.
Coppin State played a home exhibition game against NCAA Div. II Cheyney University on Nov. 14. The Eagles won’t return home to play again until Jan. 10.
Consider that by the time Coppin State tips off for its home opener, Kansas already will have played two exhibition games at home, 10 more regular-season games in Allen Fieldhouse’s cozy confines and three contests a short bus ride away at Sprint Center in Kansas City, Mo.
KU’s ninth regular-season home game takes place in January before the conference season begins. Coppin State’s ninth home game does not exist.
Last season, Coppin State began 4-19 while playing its customary rugged road schedule. The Eagles won 13 of their next 14 games, becoming the first 20-loss team in history to make the NCAA Tournament by winning the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference tournament championship.
Coppin State already has taken on another big-time program in 10th-ranked Purdue, which handed the Eagles a 66-46 drubbing.
Which team impressed more? No comparison.
“Kansas is actually a lot better because they’re more balanced,” Coppin State’s Tywain McKee said. “Purdue, they weren’t that good to me. I think Kansas is better than Purdue, for real.”
