The Ohio men's basketball team will get to take a once in a lifetime trip this summer when it travels to Europe for some international experience and preseason practice.
The remaining 10 players from this year's team will travel to Holland and Belgium where they will get to compete against international teams in a schedule consisting of five to six soon-to-be scheduled games.
The trip is something the NCAA allows universities to do once every four years. For coach Tim O'Shea, this trip will be his second with the Bobcats.
I am really grateful that the university is allowing us to do it and funding it
O'Shea said. From an educational and cultural standpoint to travel to a foreign country is a once in lifetime experience for our guys. The players from my first year when we went to Italy came away from with memories that will last forever.
The Bobcats will meet in Athens on Aug. 17 to practice and prepare for the trip over the pond. The team will then board its plane and leave for Europe Aug. 23.
The team's games will be scheduled by a program called Basketball Travelers, an organization that operates out of Seattle and sets up trips like this for 25 universities a year.
We contact the organization and it sets up the tour; it does all the paperwork with the NCAA makes sure we are certified for the trip and will send us a notebook with all the things we need to do
O'Shea said. You give the Travelers a sense of where your team is at. So I told them we are coming off an NCAA Tournament season
we have a very good team coming back and we want to play some tough competition.
Forward Sonny Troutman agreed with his coach and said that it would be a great experience in life and in the game of basketball.
It is going to be a great experience for the team; a lot of us haven't been out of the country so it will be a first for that
and it will be great for us to come together and bond more as a team
Troutman said. I think we have good chemistry now
but I think it will continue to improve more going into next season. We will be more familiar with each other
with some of the players still on their first year here
after spending all the time together. We are all excited to go over there and have a good time.
O'Shea also said the tour of Europe is to not only prepare for next season, but also continue to build chemistry and give certain players a chance to play and prove themselves.
This trip is to build confidence and also challenge ourselves with some decent competition because we got a team that I think can play at a fairly high level among
even against
