Chris Capko has his first win as Ball State basketball head coach.
Ball State (1-2) picked up its first victory of the 2026-27 season with an 89-64 home victory over Brescia — an NAIA program from Owensboro, Kentucky — on Monday, Nov. 9. After the game, Capko’s players surprised him with a celebratory cold water bottle shower, and Ball State athletic director Jeff Mitchell presented Capko with a game ball to commemorate his first career win as a head coach.
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“I wasn’t expecting of it,” Capko said. “Obviously, I knew it was my first win, but I wasn’t thinking much about it. I just wanted to win this game, I wanted it to look a certain way, and I wanted us to stick to our process of doing things the way we need to do them. When I went in there, I had a smoothie in my hand, just saying what I was saying, I was going to get them out of there pretty quick, and they got me. It was pretty cold.”
The Capko era got off to a bit of a rough start with losses to Georgia Southern and Indiana State, mostly because the Cardinals simply couldn’t find the bottom of the net. In the season opener at Georgia Southern, Ball State shot 16-for-59 (27%) from the field and 5-for-37 (13.5%) from 3-point range. In the home opener against Indiana State, Ball State fared a bit better from the field, going 24-for-44 (44.4%), but still couldn’t get going from deep, shooting 3-for-16 (18.8%) from 3-point land. The Cardinals also did not make a field goal for the last nine minutes of the game in their 69-66 loss to their in-state rival Sycamores.
The Cardinals finally found their groove against Brescia. They shot above 50% from the field by going 31-for-60 (51.7%) and shot 3s early and often, finishing the game 12-for-29 beyond the arc. Eight of the 10 players who saw minutes made a 3-pointer.
“Hopefully, we saw the lid come off the rim tonight,” Capko said. “As long as that happens, we keep playing how we’ve been playing, we’re going to give ourselves a chance. The last piece of that was making shots, we made those today, and hopefully, that continues.”
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Three games in, junior guard Sean Blake and senior guard Javion Guy-King are leading Ball State’s scoring efforts with both averaging around 15 points per game. Blake led all scorers against Brescia with 20 points, going 7-for-10 from the field and making his only 3-point attempt. Guy-King was second on the team in scoring with 17 points, all of which came in the first half after foul trouble limited him to four minutes in the first half. The latter was visibly frustrated by the early foul trouble but was able to shake it off for a strong outing the rest of the way.
“Just kind of trusting my teammates,” Guy-King said. “Got Sean out there, I knew he was getting to the hole, getting things open. That kind of generally opened up things for me to be able to get open shots with him driving and kicking it out. My coaches and my teammates believed in me, drawing up some plays for me coming out of the half, just credit to them really.”
Eighteen of Ball State’s 31 made field goals came off assists, marking the first time this season that the Cardinals assisted on more than half of their makes. The Cardinals only had 12 assists combined through their first two games — five against Georgia Southern and seven against Indiana State — but Capko has been pleased with his team’s up-tempo ball movement so far either way, attributing the low assist numbers in those games to the team’s shooting struggles more so than bad ball movement.
“Through our first two games, and even through our exhibition and scrimmage slate of our schedule, I actually thought we’ve executed much better than the numbers would show,” Capko said. “The one thing we’ve kept talking about is, we’re a better shooting team than the numbers would show. If you’re not making shots, it’s hard to get an assist, right?”
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While Ball State finally showed some signs of life offensively, they seemed to play down to their competition to an extent on defense, especially after going up by 23 over the first 10 minutes of the game. Brescia was especially effective in the second half at creating easy looks and pieced a few solid scoring runs together, though never enough to threaten the comfortable lead Ball State had built.
“I feel at times, we did get lackadaisical, just kind of got comfortable with the lead,” Blake said. “Good teams don’t do that, so going forward, we’ve just got to work on that and make sure we don’t take our foot off the gas.”
Ball State will face the toughest portion of its non-conference schedule over the next two games with a pair of road trips to ACC programs. The Cardinals will visit SMU on Friday, Nov. 13, followed by a trip to Florida State on Tuesday, Nov. 17. The SMU trip will be an emotional one for Capko, who spent the last three seasons as the associate head coach for the Mustangs, but he is more concerned with Ball State’s continued improvement than reuniting with old friends in Dallas.
“I’m worried about our team,” Capko said. “Whether it’s SMU, Florida State, Indiana State, Spalding, Eastern Michigan, Evansville, I’m worried about our team as it relates to us getting better. When we played Indiana State last game, we told them, ‘Guys, it was about us.’ This game is about us and doing what we feel like we need to do to get better. That’s all we talked about today. I know it was Brescia, they’re an NAIA school, but it didn’t matter who we played, and so now, it’s the same thing with SMU.
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“Whoever we’re playing, we need to be better at taking care of the ball. We need to do certain things defensively. We need to play with a certain effort.”
Contact Cade Hampton via email at cbhampton@usatodayco.com or on X, formerly known as Twitter, @CadeHamp10.
This article originally appeared on Muncie Star Press: Ball State basketball routs Brescia for first win of Chris Capko era
