While the NIU men’s basketball team’s 96-82 loss Saturday may be attributed to a lid on the Huskie basket during the second half, a couple of foreign obstacles also shielded the Huskies from a win.

A lack of communication seemed to pose a problem to some of the NIU players. Not a lack of communication among the Huskies, but between North American NIU and South American Club Rio Claro, Brazil.

The club of paid professionals, which only has four Americans, carried its Portuguese tongue onto the floor in Chick Evans Field House.

“(Their language) was a disadvantage to us,” said NIU forward Donnell Thomas. “We didn’t understand what they were saying, so we didn’t know what they were going to do.”

But even had the Huskies been able to predict every move of Club Rio Claro, they probably would not have stopped the hot hands of the Brazilians, who finished the game with a .537 (29-for-54) field goal percentage and a .903 (29-of-31) free throw percentage.

However, Club Rio Claro has had a lot longer to bone up on its soft touch. Of the 12-man squad, four of the players are over age 30.

“This game was different from most of the college teams we play,” said NIU guard Donald Whiteside. “The players were older and more physical—it was a test of our strength. The main thing we work on (in practice) is defending the posts inside. They (Club Rio Claro) shot really well from the outside.”

The pit stop to the “very small city” of DeKalb, as Club Rio Claro boss Jose Lux called it, was the third of its 12-game tour of the United States. Kentucky Wesleyan College, Tennessee Tech and Old Dominion are just a few of the places the squad will tour.

NIU coach Jim Rosborough met Lux in 1981, when the Huskie boss was an assistant coach at Iowa. The two coaches met in the airport when the Iowa squad was flying from Miami to Paraguay. Lux, who said he lived in the area, traveled with the team as their interpreter.

The two have remained friends since, and when Rosborough found out about Lux’s American tour, he said “get him in here (NIU).”

To Lux, the northern half of America is no more different than south.

“I’m at home here,” Lux said.