Collegiate Times

Basketball owned Lane Stadium on Sunday night.

The Virginia Tech men's basketball team gathered in the south endzone suite to watch the NCAA Tournament selection show together.

Anticipation flowed throughout the room filled with photos of Hokie football. But the basketball team eyed the televisions waiting for their name to come up on the screen. After one region was revealed without their name, the anticipation built and built.

Finally Virginia Tech (21-11) was revealed as a No. 5 seed, paired up against No. 12 Illinois (23-11) in Columbus, Ohio on Friday night at 7:10 P.M.

"Obviously there was some anxiety, but our résumé was pretty good," said Tech head coach Seth Greenberg. "We did enough to put ourselves into the NCAA Tournament and now we've got to go out and prepare to play a very good Illinois team."

The No. 5 seed is where most of the players expected to be, and now they can get ready to play another week.

"It's good to finally know who we're playing against, so now we can just look forward to preparing," said senior point guard Zabian Dowdell. "We don't want to be one of those teams that go one-and-done. We want to advance. That's the mindset of this whole team, to get in and make some noise."

Making noise is what Tech hoped to do in the Atlantic Coast Conference during this past weekend. Changes still have to be made to make a splash in the dance instead of losing to a team like North Carolina State.

"We definitely need to do a lot better in terms of having rhythm on offense," Dowdell said. "A lot of guys were standing around and watching us make plays. That will definitely be a focus. This is another game to us. Obviously we're glad to be in, but we're not content with that."

Junior Deron Washington and sophomore A.D. Vassallo will be major contributors for the Hokies, who have to control an Illinois team that plays a slow game.

"It's going to be more of a powerful game," Washington said. "The Big Ten has more of a physical game and we have to match that intensity to be ready to play."

The Illini take care of the basketball and play the best defense in the Big Ten conference. Of all of the teams the Hokies played this season, the coaches think Illinois is similar to Clemson, a team that beat Tech at home only two weeks ago.

"I know Bruce Weber is a magnificent coach," Greenberg said. "I know they're going to play all man-to-man (defense), they're going to run a motion offense and they're going to screen really hard, because they're a terrific screening team."

The Hokies started yesterday to play their first game in a tournament. Virginia Tech was last in the "Big Dance" in 1996. The senior stars in Dowdell, Jamon Gordon and Coleman Collins will only have one chance to leave a legacy.

"This is the NCAA Tournament and this is what they've been working on for four years," Greenberg said. "This is the goal that they set at the start of the season. It wasn't to win the ACC Championship or to be in the top 25, it was to make the NCAA Tournament. Now that they've reached it, now we just have to make sure that our guys don't settle. The goal is now to advance."