Iowa State Basketball

Iowa State Basketball, plays at one of the most electrifying and exciting gymnasium’s to step foot inside of in the entire country, formally known as Hilton Coliseum. Iowa State University is located in Ames, Iowa, a large campus but a small enough city almost dead center in the middle of Iowa to have a small and tight community feel about it. The Cyclones have been ranked in the top 25 college basketball teams for almost the entire year with a record of 16-4 on the year, playing against some of the top teams in the nation as they have big wins against Kansas and Kansas State this year. Heading into the final month of the regular season the Cyclones hope to only grow and improve their team chemistry as many of the starting players will return next year as long as they don’t declare for the NBA draft after the end of the season in March. Hilton Coliseum is such a crazy and enthusiastic place to play the players and fans have come up with an equally absurd reason, a thing known as Hilton Magic in Ames. The coliseum really only gets louder as the game progresses and the team warms up. It was on ESPN on a special feature known as the House of Hoops, a show that shows the greatest places to play in all of college basketball. As long as the Clones are able to avoid a disaster at the end of one of the best regular seasons this team has seen in a very long time, they will easily be put into the NCAA National Tournament and at a pretty high seed or ranking as well. Ever since Coach Fred Hoiberg, who as a former Cyclone player himself came to be the head coach of this team 3 years ago, has taken this program to completely new heights, making a name for himself with many transfers coming in from all of the country, players such as DeAndre Kane, Royce White who is now traveling around the NBA’s D League, and UNLV transfer Bryce- Dejean Jones. Coach Hoiberg is known as the “mayor” of Ames, a nickname he was given back when he played for the Cyclones a while back. In between that time and now he had a long stint in the NBA both as a player and in the front office for the Minnesota Timberwolves. (400)