Men's Basketball | 11/11/2016 12:13:00 AM

ABILENE – One of the most promising seasons in recent ACU men's basketball history gets started Friday night when the Wildcats host Schreiner University in a non-conference tilt at Moody Coliseum.Tipoff is set for 7 p.m. and the game can be seen and heard only on acusports.com ACU head coachis entering his sixth season as the Wildcats' mentor, and he leads a team into the 2016-17 season that returns seven players from last year's team and includes six new faces. Golding's team is one of the up-and-coming teams in the Southland Conference and in mid-major basketball.Reigning Southland Conference Freshman of the Year,, returns to the starting lineup, along with fellow sophomoresand. They'll be joined by senior, juniorsand, and freshmenandThe Wildcats finished 13-18 overall and 8-10 in the Southland Conference, a record that would have been good enough for them to qualify for the Southland Conference Post-Season Tournament had they been eligible. ACU won't be eligible for conference or NCAA post-season tournaments until the 2017-18 season when their four-year transition ends.Franklin has already been selected to the Southland Conference preseason all-conference first team after earning second team all-conference honors as well as Freshman of the Year honors in 2015-16.On a 2015-16 ACU team loaded with youth, Franklin proved himself to be the best freshman in the Southland Conference in 2015-16, leading the Wildcats to eight conference wins, doubling their total from the 2014-15 season. Franklin finished seventh in the league in scoring at 16.2 points per game – the top mark among freshmen in the league – and finished sixth in the league in steals per game (1.7 per game) and 14th in the league in field goal percentage (51.3 percent).Franklin led the Wildcats in scoring in 16 of 30 games played this season and scored 20 points or more in eight games. He scored a career-high 29 points in a Jan. 19 home win over McNeese State, and then added 28 on Feb. 27 in an 87-84 home win over Houston Baptist.Franklin was also named second team all-Southland Conference, the first Wildcat to earn all-Southland honors since Willie Calvert and Andrew Prince were selected second team all-conference and honorable mention, respectively, in 1972-73, ACU's final season in the league before leaving for the Southland Conference.After the season, Franklin finished as the runner-up in a national fan vote as the College Court Report Mid-Major Freshman of the Year.Franklin and the Wildcats have been picked to finish sixth in the Southland Conference in 2016-17, a huge jump for a program that was picked to finish last in 2015-16, but finished six spots ahead of that prediction."We're ready to take another step forward. and we're not hiding from the expectations," Golding said. "We want to continue to move this program forward. We return a lot of guys who played a lot of minutes in the Southland last year. We've still got one of the youngest rosters in the country, but we have experienced youth. We've got a lot of guys on this team who were thrown in the fire last year because of our youth, and I thought they did a great job for the most part."The Wildcats lost their all-time leader in 3-point field goal percentage in, another shooter who hit better than 40 percent from 3-point range in, a floor general in point guardand an inside presence in. Without those shooters, the Wildcats might look a bit different offensively, but Golding believes they'll be just as effective."We're bigger, longer and more athletic this year than we were last year," Golding said. "We've worked extremely hard in the weight room since the spring, and you can tell the strides we've made there just by looking at our guys. We pass the eye test now and look like a Division I basketball team. We've complete transformed our roster from two years ago when we had seven guys under 6 feet tall to where now we don't have anyone under 6 feet tall. I'm excited about that, but that doesn't produce wins. We have to go play."We'll play differently than we did last year," Golding said. "I don't think we're a bad outside shooting team because we've got guys who can hit shots, but we can really score in the paint. The more attention those guys draw inside creates better outside shots."