Record: (6-11)
Postseason: None
Coach: Bill Chandler
Captains: Bernol Ketchum, Matthew Reich
Leading Scorer: Raymond Kuffel (8.4 ppg)

Ten points might have turned the hard luck story of the basketball season into a happy tale of success. Coach Bill Chandler's crew of neophytes dropped 11 of 17 games, but the record of games won and lost belies the actual strength of the team.

Playing perhaps the stiffest schedule in Marquette basketball history, the cagers made each opponent fight to the very last second to achieve victory. Strong point of the squad was its habit of staging roaring second half counter-assaults, either tying up the game in the last minutes or forcing their opponents to lose by larger margins than two or three points. At home or away, the team usually had the fans in uproar with its sensational second half comebacks.

For the scond consecutive year Coach Chandler opened the season without reliable holdovers from the preceding campaign and with considerable laco of scoring power. Keeping upperclassmen in reserve, he experimented principally with sophomore talent to develop a winning combination.

An all-sophomore lineup of Jack Dentinger at center, Bob Pierce and John Millunzi at forwards, and Burt Bril and Al Skat at guards answered the call in the season's first emngagements. Immediately following the close of the football season Ray Kuffel, star end, took over in basketball where he left off in football, displacing Pierce in the lineup. This combine showed itself to be long on scrap and enthusiasm but short on poise and team play, revealing only sporadic flashes of its potential ability by copping but three of the nine first semester games.

Dentinger pacing the scoring in this period, with Kuffel not far behind. Skat, Bril and Millunzi proved themselves capable of playing as regulars, with Pierce, veteran Tom McCarthy, diminutive Dick Collentine and Bill Chandler Jr., supplying reserve strength.

After a surprise 36-31 win over the alumni, Marquette couldn't overcome its jitters in the Wisconsin fieldhouse and lost to the Badgers on John Kotz' last minute basket, 35-34. After this close one the team gave Illinois' Big 10 champs the scare of their lives, the rangy Illini outlasting the Hilltoppers in another close game, 45-43. Next, the Chandlermen momentarily hit the win column, drubbing Chicago, 49-24.

Far from the polished machine of the previous week, Marquette again lost to Wisconsin, 36-25, on the Auditorium floor. It was the first defeat on the downtown court since 1936. On the same floor, the team resumed its winning ways with a 49-42 triumph over Michigan in the first half of the New Year's Eve doubleheader. In another Auditorium twin bill the next week, Marquette beat Butler, 39-29.