By Grant Pepper

Icon readers: With college basketball season now in full swing, I have decided to publish a weekly podcast that will give listeners inside access to the Ohio Northern men’s basketball team.

Alongside my co-host (and four-year roommate) Brandon Hawkins, who is also a senior on the team, we will do weekly player interviews as well as breakdowns of each game. We will detail the ups and downs of the season, from the perspective of guys who are on the court and in the locker room every day.

We finished second in the OAC last season with a chance to win the conference in our last regular season game at Marietta, but couldn’t pull it off. This year, we are trying to win the OAC for the first time since 2001, when Northern made it to the Final four. Hopefully, this podcast will give our listeners some insight into the trials and tribulations of this season.

Brandon and I plan on recording the podcast every Sunday and publishing it every Monday in an effort to recap each week of action, although certain weeks may stray from those dates based on our game schedule. While I work for the ONU campus newspaper and radio station, this podcast will not be affiliated with either of those entities. This was something that I wanted to do independently, to give a first-hand account of our season and to do it with my teammates and best friends.

Hopefully, you can learn more about the team through listening to this weekly, half-hour podcast. In our first podcast of the season, which we published last Friday, we talked about our first two games of the season -- a 10-point loss to Div. I Toledo (which was technically an exhibition game) and a 106-94 win over Defiance. We interviewed one of our senior captains this year, Joey DiOrio, who starts at the three-guard position. DiOrio led the OAC in three-point shooting percentage last year, and we talked about everything from his pregame preparation to his past as a baseball player (he was a catcher) and a high school basketball state champion (for Bishop Watterson High School in Columbus).

To listen to the first ever ‘Polar Bear Hoop Talk’ podcast, click the link below (and keep reading the Icon for links to all of our future podcasts).

https://soundcloud.com/grantpepper/polar-bear-hoop-talk-11-24-joey-d

Follow Grant Pepper on Twitter: @GrantPepper