The South Dakota men's basketball team continues its three-game road trip Sunday with a 5 p.m. (CST) tipoff at San Jose State. The West Coast swing started at Northern Arizona on Thursday and concludes Tuesday at UCLA.
 
The Game
South Dakota, winners of three-straight, is 10-3 this year after topping Northern Arizona 90-77 last Thursday. San Jose State will be going eight days between games, having last played last week Saturday at Portland. The Spartans fell 64-55 in the contest and are 2-7 on the season.
 
The Spartans
Ryan Welage leads San Jose averaging 18.2 points per contest. Jaycee Hillsman is second on the team with 8.4 points per contest.
 
Jean Prioleau is in his first season coaching San Jose State after spending the past seven seasons at Colorado. Over that time, he experienced the NCAA tournament four times and the NIT another two times. Prioleau earned a degree in physics from Fordham, where he scored 1,442 points and earned all-conference honors.
 
The Coyotes
South Dakota is off to its best start in the Division I era at 10-3. The three-game road trip began with a 90-77 victory over Northern Arizona. Matt Mooney tallied a team-high 24 points, Tyler Hagedorn scored 20 points and Nick Fuller scored a career-high 17 points as the Coyotes claimed their first-ever victory in Flagstaff, Arizona.
 
Mooney leads the team with 17.2 points per game while Hagedorn added 13.6 points per contest. Trey Burch-Manning leads the Coyotes with 7.7 rebounds per game.
 
South Dakota ranks seventh in NCAA Division I with 201 assists on the season and eighth with 497 total rebounds.
 
The Series
The Spartans and Coyotes have met just two times, coming in back-to-back years of 1973-74 and 1974-75. San Jose State claimed victories in both contests, a 94-66 score in Vermillion and a 93-52 score in San Jose.
 
South Dakota last defeated a Mountain West Conference opponent on Dec. 1, 2010. That year, the Coyotes topped Wyoming in Vermillion.
 
One Last Thing
Junior Matt Mooney has a history inside The Event Center, the home arena for San Jose State, when he was a freshman at Air Force. Mooney had his best game of his freshman campaign against San Jose State with 20 points in 30 minutes of action. He went 7-of-12 from the field and hit four 3-point baskets.