The Eastern football players prepared for the five-hour Hawaii time difference by doing nothing.

After they left for Honolulu Wednesday afternoon, the Panthers did not set their watch back. Instead they acted as if they were still in Charleston by scheduling everything by central time.

“We woke them up when they’d normally get up here, practiced at the same time and tried to make sure they were going to bed at the same time as well,” Eastern defensive coordinator Roc Bellantoni said.

Because of 2006 being the second trip to Hawaii in the last four years, the Panther coaching staff does feel better prepared to go back to Ohio Valley Conference play.

“I’m sure that we will go back to practicing with pads this week because they use a more physical style than a WAC team,” Bellantoni said about Southeast Missouri, Eastern’s opponent Saturday.

That more physical style includes a multiple option attack that SEMO head coach Tony Samuel used while he was a player at Nebraska.

“It’s two completely different systems and so we need to be able to adjust to multiple things,” Bellantoni said.

The schedule change and dealing with the distractions before and after the Hawaii trip was easier for senior members of the Eastern coaching staff who were around for the 2002 trip.

“For me it was much more organized because we tried to sleep on the plane when we went there for the first time and that just doesn’t work,” Bellantoni said. “This year we left during the day on Wednesday and when we landed in Hawaii, we handed them all a pizza and told them to go to bed.”

Eastern will go back to its normal practice schedule as the Panthers get ready for Southeast Missouri and its first home game in more than a month.

“We will have our normal schedule this week and the time change is something we cannot change,” Eastern acting head coach Mark Hutson said.

The Panthers came out of the Aloha state nearly injury-free.

The only Eastern player to leave the game was cornerback Seymour Loftman. The junior cornerback received a concussion and his status for this week is questionable.

“The only player we know we don’t have is (inside linebacker Clint) Sellers and everybody has one out at this point,” Bellantoni said.

The one positive to come out of a 35-point loss to the Warriors is the amount of experience the second-string players got on both sides of the ball. After halftime, Eastern began removing the starters from the game.

“We figured that we wanted to get a bunch of guys time and if we gave up 80 points, then at least our guys would be fresher,” Bellantoni said. “We had some big time blunders in that game but I’d rather they make them against Hawaii than later in the year in OVC play.”