Ohio: the home of 2 different Hoosiers

Eric Arnett and Tom Pritchard probably could not be more different.

Pritchard is the new face of IU basketball, a loyal, late-blooming commit who weathered the storm that was Kelvin Sampson and is now a likely Big Ten Freshman of the Year candidate. He’s a blossoming post presence Tom Crean may rely on for years to come.

Arnett won’t even be on the basketball team another week. Brought on in the fall as an extra body in practice, Arnett makes his real living as a pitcher on the IU baseball team, and a rather accomplished one at that.

Arnett could dress but not play this year for the Hoosiers, who didn’t want to count another scholarship against their limit. He’ll return to the baseball team following tonight’s game at Ohio State.

But Arnett and Pritchard do share one common bond: they are both native sons of Ohio, and while tonight will be more of a homecoming for Arnett, from Pataskala, a Columbus suburb, than Pritchard, from Westlake, near Cleveland, both will play as close to home as they are likely to all season when IU faces the Buckeyes.

A weekend starter most of 2008 – college baseball teams save their best starters for weekend series – Arnett went 4-5 with a 4.45 ERA in 17 appearances, nine of them starts. He looks to be part of a rotation that will include coveted southpaw Matt Bashore and a bevy of left-handers who should challenge for the distinction of best rotation in the conference.

But along with teammate Kipp Schutz, Arnett put baseball away for the last two months of last year and suited up in candy-striped pants. Schutz played, Arnett didn’t. But according to Crean, that hasn’t stopped the 6-foot-5 junior right-hander from contributing in exactly the ways the coach needed him to.

Crean has talked all year about having to teach his team the necessity of breeding full-on competition in every minute of every practice, so what Crean said Monday after practice came as high praise for Arnett.

“He was already a competitor when he got here,” Crean said, launching into a story about Arnett’s practice intensity.

Pritchard, by contrast, was an afterthought on his own team for much of high school, often giving way to more heralded teammate and now-Michigan State freshman Delvon Roe.

But the story has been told time and again on message boards: Roe went down to a knee injury before the duo’s senior year. That’s when Pritchard “made his mark in Ohio,” as Crean put it, leading Lakewood St. Edward all the way to a berth in the state title game. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer even named him its player of the year. 

Now, Pritchard is set up to be the four-year poster child for Crean’s version of IU basketball. Arnett will rejoin the baseball team when he gets back from Columbus. Again, so different in so many ways – all that links them, at least in the public eye, is the state they call home.

It goes without saying that none of this will probably have any effect on the outcome of
tonight’s game. But in a season destined for more sad days than sunny in Hoosier nation, it seems awfully therapeutic to embrace these kinds of stories, if only to realize this is still a basketball team.

So many people have written these Hoosiers off as little more than a necessary punishment for prior sins – expectations, for those who even set any, pretty much stop at playing hard.

It’s more than likely fans will block this season from their memories as soon as possible, ensuring they never have to view IU basketball as anything but occupying a mount equal to Zeus.

But these players, coaches, trainers, managers – they all have stories, they all add character and their own expectations of how they want this season to turn out, and they work tirelessly.

So let’s just take a minute to recognize that, shall we?

See you tomorrow.

Osterman's prediction: IU 76 - Ohio State 69