First-year Valley coach dealing with tough 0-14 start

The schedule was successful, raising about $550,000 in guaranteed payouts, almost twice as much as the previous record. But--at the cost of a 0-13 record for the Delta Devils and first year Coach Sean Woods.

The losses for Mississippi Valley State's first-year coach Sean Woods have come with such regularity, even he's having trouble keeping count. "I never thought my coaching career would start at 0-13," Woods said Monday during a presentation to the Greenwood Rotary Club. Actually, the Delta Devils' season-opening string of defeats ran to 14 Saturday, when Valley dropped its preseason SWAC opener to Arkansas Pine-Bluff.

Woods, who starred as a player at one of the nation's premier basketball powerhouses, the University of Kentucky, isn't used to such futility. "When you lose that many games in a row ... you forget how to win," Woods said. Woods, 38, inherited two major obstacles when he took over in July as the head coach, replacing James Green, who had moved on to Jacksonville State.

The cupboard of talent was fairly bare, with only three players returning from last year's SWAC championship squad, and not much time to replenish it. And he was handed a killer non-conference schedule - the third toughest in the nation, according to Woods. Except for the season-opener against Tennessee-Chattanooga, all of the other dozen non-conference games were played on the road.

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NEXT: The Delta Devils will host Alabama A&M at 7:30 p.m., Saturday