DATE: Saturday, November 29, 1997           TAG: 9711290495

SECTION: SPORTS                  PAGE: C1   EDITION: FINAL 

SERIES: Day 10

        The Norfolk State men's basketball team will spend most of this

        season, its first at the Division I level, traveling. The Spartans

        have 19 away games and will spend nearly 50 days on the road -

        including stops in Los Angeles, Hawaii, Wyoming and Colorado. 

SOURCE: BY PAUL WHITE, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   58 lines

LIFE'S LESSONS LEARNED ON NSU'S WESTERN SWING SPARTANS' 10-DAY GEOGRAPHY COURSE WAS A GRIND . . . BUT IT HAD ITS MOMENTS.

If you're 6-foot-7, don't walk down the aisle of an airplane without checking for television monitors hanging from the ceiling.

That's just one of the lessons learned by the Norfolk State Spartans during their 10-day, four-game basketball journey out West, a trip that featured two blowout losses, their first Division I victory and a frustrating near-miss at Colorado.

Among the other things they discovered:

Telling someone from California or Colorado that you're on the Norfolk State basketball team almost always means having to explain where Norfolk is.

Pulling on your jersey and motioning to the coaches works OK, but the quickest way to get out of a game is to do something dumb.

The winning teams are highlighted in yellow on the scores that crawl across the bottom of the screen on CNN.

It may sound adventurous, but rooming with a fellow Spartan on road trips, even in a hotel as nice as the Hyatt Regency, quickly becomes a heck of a lot like living in a dorm.

The stuff head coach Mike Bernard and his staff has been preaching since Oct. 18 actually works. But you have to do it for all 40 minutes if you want to win.

If you can't make long-distance telephone calls to the ones you love, scribbling down a few thoughts on a postcard is the next-to-next-best thing to being there.

Make poor choices regarding the type of food you eat and you may see that food again.

For a guy who took two years off from playing basketball, Kenny Brown isn't a bad Division I point guard.

The more one learns about the discipline and intensity required to master the college game, the more NBA players appear selfish and uninterested. Or maybe that's just the Los Angeles Clippers.

Bernard is the wrong man to heckle. The Long Beach State fans left him alone after the Spartans' coach silenced one badgerer with a non-vulgar, two-word, ``old-school'' comeback. That was cold, coach.

Damian Woolfolk will kill teams with his jumper if they leave him alone.

Teams aren't going to leave Woolfolk alone anymore.

The fast-paced schedule of a team on the road - practices, classes, team meals, games - makes checking out the tourist spots an unlikely proposition, even in a city like Los Angeles. Spartans center Sean Blackwell was wrong when he referred to the Spartans' experience as a business trip. Businessmen have a lot more fun on the road than do college basketball players.

Losing after maintaining a lead until the game's final five minutes at Colorado hurt worse than getting blown out by 42 at Pepperdine.

The Spartans can compete with Division I teams.

Just being competitive gets old in a hurry.

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