One job is done, now the next is clear for Western Kentucky’s men’s basketball team.

A day after securing the Conference USA automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament by dispatching UTEP 78-71 in the championship game on Saturday night in Huntsville, Alabama, the Hilltoppers learned their next task Sunday afternoon during an NCAA Tournament Selection Show watch party in their home gymnasium at E.A. Diddle Arena.

WKU (22-11) enters NCAA play for the first time since 2013 at a No. 15 seed and will take on No. 2 seed Marquette (25-9) in a first-round matchup Friday at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. Game time is 1 p.m. Central, with TBS set to broadcast the action.

For being a 15 seed, the matchup is about all the Hilltoppers could have hoped for – a drive of about three hours for WKU fans to watch their team take on the Big East Conference tournament runner-up Golden Eagles.

“I say it all the time – sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good,” WKU coach Steve Lutz said. “And we’ve had a great year, and these guys have done the job. They deserve every opportunity. Whether the NCAA Tournament committee did it on purpose or not, it doesn’t matter. It’s fallen in our favor and things are aligning for us to have a chance to go beat Marquette. That’s got to be our focus between now and Friday.”

Having just learned the Tops’ first-round opponent on Sunday, Lutz had not yet had a chance to break down the Golden Eagles on film. But Lutz is plenty familiar with Marquette coach Shaka Smart and expects the Golden Eagles to be everything a No. 2 seed should – formidable.

“When you get to the NCAA Tournament, your prep’s going to be short and you’re going to see an opponent that probably doesn’t know everything about you, right,” Lutz said. “So it’s a fresh start is the way that I look at it. When you get into league play, you play people two or three times they know your tendencies and they know what you’re about and they’re able to take some of those things away.

“Now, Shaka Smart’s a good coach. I know that he’s going to do a good job, and his staff will do a good job in prepping, but it’ll be a new game where people are starting at square one – kind of like the beginning of the season. So you like to think that you’re able to run a little more offense freely and those sorts of things.”

Smart is equally familiar with Lutz, having encountered WKU’s first-year head coach during Lutz’s tenure as an assistant at Purdue.

“I actually know coach Lutz pretty well from Western Kentucky,” Smart said during a news conference Sunday. “He does a heckuva job. We were assistants at the same time for a while, and then he was terrific with Matt Painter at Purdue. So we’ll dive in and get to know their team, but more importantly, it’s about being the best us and that’s what we work toward all year.”

WKU’s players and staff watched the NCAA Selection Show broadcast on the scoreboard monitors inside E.A. Diddle Arena. For junior point guard Don McHenry, seeing WKU’s name pop up on the bracket underneath No. 2 seed Marquette was an extra thrill. McHenry, the Tops’ leading scorer this season, is a Milwaukee native who gets the rare opportunity to face his hometown school.

“I was going to be excited either way, just being in the tournament no matter who we played,” said McHenry, who was named the CUSA Tournament’s most valuable player following his game-high 25-point outing in the championship against UTEP. “But it’s kind of special in a way, that’s how it played out and that’s a team that we play from my hometown.”

Way beyond taking on a hometown team is just making the NCAA Tournament field for McHenry, who started his college career at the NCAA Division II level at Hawaii-Hilo then moved on to play a year of junior-college ball at Indian Hills (Iowa) Community College before finally finding a spot at WKU for this season.

“It’s a lot of different emotions,” McHenry said. “I don’t know if I can really describe it in one word. It’s like surreal – it feels kind of like a dream or something.”

Lutz is looking forward to bringing the Hilltoppers to Indianapolis and seeing what they can accomplish.

“Just going to the NCAA Tournament with these guys and having the opportunity to compete and get us back to a Final Four and compete for a national title – that’s what you do this for,” Lutz said. “We’re just excited about that. We play Marquette on Friday, obviously we’’ll give it our best but to get here at this point especially in the first season is fantastic.”{&end}