On the weekend of October 17-20, the Missouri men’s basketball team took a retreat to Moberly, Missouri, to do some team bonding with the season less than a month away. The retreat was not announced, as coach Kim Anderson “wanted to keep it quiet,” with the goal being to give the players a weekend of zero distractions.

“It got us away,” Anderson said. “There’s a lot of things going on around here, a lot of distractions. Not bad distractions, just distractions. I had a lot of stuff going on, so it was good for me to get away for a couple of days and all we did was basketball.”

As fun as that might sound, it was hardly a walk in the park for the Tigers.

“Moberly was hard,” junior forward Ryan Rosburg said. “We had two-a-days for three days, so it was a bunch of practices. Basically just hotel, sleep, get ready for practice, go back to bed, get ready for another practice.”

But while many hours were spent in the gym installing new defenses and working on making the extra pass, there was also fun to be had — Anderson’s type of fun.

“We stayed in a hotel. It was a nice hotel,” Anderson joked. “We went out to eat, ate at some fine dining establishments in Moberly, then we watched the Mizzou-Florida football game and took away their cell phones during dinner so we had some jovial conversation.”

The weekend challenged the team, but also seemed to resonate with players quite well.

“It was perfect for us because we’re new playing with each other and it was just a draining weekend,” Rosburg said. “But we all came together on the court and off the court and battled through some things over there.”