Harvard’s non-league season reaches a climax on Dec. 22, when the Crimson will jump for a 7 p.m. tip-off against Boston College, last year’s Big East champions.

“It’s a game we’ve always played every four or five years. We’ve always played pretty well over there,” Holden said. “They think they’re going to be picked in the top half of the ACC, if not the top two or three. It gives our kids something to get worked up about, playing a national team like that.”

Like Vermont, BC fell in the second round of the NCAA tournament.

Holden said the lineup isn’t ground-breaking.

“It’s pretty much the same schedule we’ve always played,” he said.

CRASHING NEW BOARDS

When the Crimson opens against Vermont, it will play in a renovated home arena that can now rival the best courts in the nation—at least with regards to the floor beneath the players’ feet.

The floor in Lavietes Pavilion has been replaced with a state-of-the-art Robbins Bio-Channel Classic floor system, the same floor beneath the Blue Devils at Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium.

“We came to the conclusion that they had the best to offer what we needed,” Assistant Manager of Operations Mark Bresnahan said. Robbins claims the floor’s continuous-strip XL450 maple outlasts the competition by a decade. The floor in Lavietes had not been replaced since the center opened in 1982.

“The floor is the original floor from when we started playing basketball here [almost] 25 years ago,” Holden said. “We’ve been very fortunate in that, knock on wood, we haven’t had knee injuries.”

Recently, however, the quality of the floor had been compromised.

“There was water damage in the facility, and it caused...some problems with the floor,” Bresnahan said.

“They did a great job in replacing it,” Holden said. “It’s got good bounce to it. Obviously, the making of floors has come a long way in the last 25 years.”

—Staff writer Samuel C. Scott can be reached at sscott@fas.harvard.edu.