Wichita State basketball adds another KC trip to schedule to play Saint Louis

For a third straight year, the Wichita State men’s basketball team will play a neutral-site game in Kansas City.

And this time, the Shockers are reviving an old Missouri Valley Conference rivalry.

Wichita State will play Saint Louis at T-Mobile Center in Kansas City, Missouri, as part of the Hall of Fame Classic on Friday, November 22, according to reporting from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and scheduling expert Rocco Miller.

While the Hall of Fame Classic has traditionally been a two-game tournament, it will instead be a one-off doubleheader in KC this season with Iowa and Utah State playing in the other game.

The Shockers played two games in the 2022 Hall of Fame Classic, defeating Grand Canyon and losing to San Francisco, while they also played in-state rivals K-State and KU at T-Mobile Center last season. WSU also competed in the Hall of Fame Classic in 2013, winning the title in dominant fashion over DePaul and BYU.

WSU and SLU once clashed regularly as MVC rivals from 1946 to 1974 until the Billikens departed for the Metro Conference. The two sides have actually played five times in the past decade, all WSU wins, including last year’s 88-69 victory in the Myrtle Beach Invitational.

But Saint Louis will look radically different this upcoming season with the hire of Josh Schertz, who became a hot name in the coaching world following his success at Indiana State. He brought with him his two best players from ISU, 6-foot-10 center Robbie Avila (17.4 points, 6.6 rebounds, 4.1 assists) and point guard Isaiah Swope (15.9 points) and retained SLU’s leading scorer in Gibson Jimerson (15.8 points).

The neutral-site game is expected to be one of the more difficult tests of a nonconference slate that also includes two games in Orlando against some combination of Florida, Wake Forest and Minnesota, a Saturday, December 21 date against Kansas State at Koch Arena and road trips to DePaul and Western Kentucky.