To not look ahead is a hard thing for any practicing basketball team to do at this point in time.

The “monotony,” as Eastern coach Rick Samuels calls it, of the annual practices and hard work of the fall is broken only by exhibition games later on and the look-ahead to the schedule to see who is up first.

“At this point the schedule is pretty firm and pretty much set for the year,” Samuels said. “The only other thing we would like to change would be the addition of one more exhibition game.”

As of right now, the Panthers only have Winona State scheduled as an exhibition opponent.

The team has been left scrambling because usual scrimmage partner, Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, is no longer on the schedule. They provide one more opportunity for the team to get out on the court against competition that is from a different team.

“Exhibition games at least provide us with a chance to break up the monotony of everyday practices,” Samuels said. “The more we play in the preseason, the more of a chance the players have to work out any butterflies that may be in their stomachs.”

Looking ahead to the regular season schedule, things may be more in favor of the Panthers than they had been last year.

The Panthers, this season, have an interesting schedule to look forward to considering early on it is reliant on home game against regional rivals.

Every year, when Eastern schedules teams like Northern Illinois or Western Illinois, the status of who plays on the home court rotates between the two teams.

This season the rotation gives the Panthers a fairly lenient home schedule against teams they know pretty well, considering the team has Northern Illinois, Western Illinois and Evansville all at home this year.

“That makes for an appealing home schedule,” Samuels said. “The games that can be considered regional rivalries we have at home.

“I think they have become rivalries considering the schools are closely related and many of the players who play against each other know each other already and that is why the game may mean a little more to them – bragging rights.”

Besides those games at home, the Panthers will have some difficult non-conference opponents. Most of those games will also be testing Eastern on the road.

Opening night, the Panthers travel to the Rosemont Horizon to take on DePaul, a team that is coming off an NCAA Tournament birth just a year ago.

They also travel to Kansas State and Purdue, in back-to-back games, before the Ohio Valley Conference schedule begins.

The team travels to Kansas State on Dec. 30, and to Purdue on Jan. 1.

But those games will be seen as tests to Samuels and his team, a test against some top-notch competition.

“For us those games will be very tough, but that is why we schedule them,” Samuels said. “It is a convenient time to schedule those kinds of schools because there are no classes, and we can travel.”

Further down the line, Eastern will also have a difficult start to the OVC season as they start on the road for the first four games.

Samuels refuses to believe in that aspect of the schedule as a negative, however, because he hopes his team will learn how to win on the road creating an easier time of it at home.

“We have to believe we can win those games on the road,” Samuels said. “That way when we come back home we can have the comfort of playing on our court with the advantage of already winning some important games on the road.”