Roller Coaster Trojans Face Tennessee Today

USC Coach George Raveling said Friday that he had been well aware that his relatively young basketball team would be involved in a roller coaster ride in pre-conference season games.

There have been more valleys than peaks for the Trojans, however, and they have a 1-5 record going into today’s game with Tennessee (1-0) at the Sports Arena.

“Some nights we feel good about ourselves and other nights we don’t feel so good,” Raveling said. “I’m just trying to stay as patient and poised as I can.”

If Raveling has any regrets, they are caused by his earlier flattering remarks about his personnel.

“By nature, I’m a positive person and, in my enthusiasm, I might have have gone overboard in the assessment of the talent,” he said. “It was ill-advised to go public with my feelings.”

Raveling still believes, though, that he has enough talented players at his disposal. But there’s a catch.

“We’ve had some good individual performances in games, but not team performances,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s a team game.”

Raveling is still trying to settle on a rotation of players who complement one another. He calls it cohesiveness.

He says that other people put more importance on a starting lineup than he does, given that he is using 10 to 12 players a game.

For today’s game, starting at 3, he will open with guards Andy Olivarez and Dave Wiltz, center Chris Munk and forwards Bob Erbst and Ronnie Coleman.

Guard Anthony Pendleton scored a game-high 29 points in an 85-66 loss to Cal State Long Beach Wednesday night, making 9 of 15 three-point shots.

Raveling said that Pendleton has told him that he’d rather not start, that he feels more comfortable coming off the bench.

Tennessee has an experienced front line led by 6-foot 7-inch forward Dyron Nix, whom Raveling calls one of the premier small forwards in the country.

However, Coach Don DeVoe doesn’t have a comparable replacement for guard Tony White, a two-time Southeastern Conference scoring leader, who is now with the New York Knicks.

Trojan Notes Tennessee opened the season Dec. 3 by defeating Marquette, 82-56, at Knoxville, Tenn., before a school record-crowd of 25,272. The Thompson-Boling Assembly Center and Arena is the largest on-campus basketball facility in the country. The Volunteers may suffer from cultural shock today. The turnout will be considerably less than 25,000. Say, 22,000 fewer fans. . . . USC Coach George Raveling said forward Alan Pollard, a transfer from BYU, shocked and surprised him with his quick recovery from arthroscopic knee surgery Nov. 16. Pollard played briefly against Seattle Dec. 3 and was used more extensively against Alabama last Saturday and Cal State Long Beach. . . Tennessee had an overall 14-15 record last season, finishing in a tie for eighth in the Southeastern Conference. . . . Forward Dyron Nix won the SEC rebounding title in 1986-87 as a sophomore. He averaged 10.1 rebounds a game. . . . USC guard Anthony Pendleton has taken 60 shots in 6 games, 53 from behind the three-point line. He is 22 for 53 in three-point shots, 41.5%, but the rest of the team has attempted only 23 from three-point range. . . . USC’s players will be involved in final examinations next week, then will open the Pacific 10 Conference season Dec. 21 at Stanford.