Spring break usually means the beginning of the Mid-American Conference Tournament for the men’s basketball team.

But this year, Central will host its biggest rival – Western Michigan – at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Rose Arena, most likely with the student section noticeably absent.

Men’s basketball coach Ernie Zeigler said the conflict with spring break was not brought to his attention beforehand and called it a miscommunication.

“It’s really frustrating for us. Quite honestly, our league dropped the ball on this one,” Zeigler said. “For me personally, it’s just another thing within our conference and within our program that as a basketball coach, you have to micro-manage everything.”

CMU also hosts Toledo on March 9.

The MAC schedule was approved last summer, said Athletics Director Dave Heeke.

“It certainly doesn’t give us an opportunity to have a strong student home-court advantage,” Heeke said. “The arena won’t be quite as hostile, and that’s disappointing, but it is somewhat how the calendar falls.”

In 2007, spring break took place in the second week of March, when the men’s basketball MAC Tournament is typically scheduled.

“We make sure the conference office knows the dates of our academic calendar, but they can’t really guarantee anything in terms of where games fall,” Heeke said.

The only MAC game scheduled for this week is today’s WMU-Northern Illinois matchup, a make-up game rescheduled after the Feb. 14 shootings on NIU’s campus.

Rick Boyages, the MAC’s associate commissioner and director of men’s basketball operations, oversees the scheduling process, which he said undergoes at least 60 revisions. He said the bye week is designed to give the six MAC teams that traveled during the weekend for ESPN BracketBusters time to regroup and is not related to midterm exams.

“I think the bottom line is your team has to go out on the court and win the game,” Boyages said. “We would prefer to have the best game environments we can, we just can’t always guarantee that … I don’t want to say it’s not important – I want the students at every game.”

Boyages said the schedule begins with several parameters that take precedent, including not having teams play three consecutive road games.

“There’s so many moving parts and so many variables that it’s tough to keep everybody happy,” he said. “If it’s enough of an issue and it works its way up the ladder and we can deal with this concern, especially with CMU’s rivalry with Western or Eastern, I’ll do everything in my power to see if we can continue to improve the schedule.”

Zeigler said he will make the league office aware of his views on the issue.

“Hopefully this mistake won’t occur again, and it won’t under my watch because we’re going to make sure the league office is aware of the scheduling snafu,” he said. “Both parties have to take blame.”

CMU is 5-1 in conference home games and 1-6 on the road. Zeigler said student support has been important in each of the team’s home wins.

“We reassess the schedule every year,” Boyages said. “If there’s concern from the administration of CMU, then we’ll do our best to try to adjust it. But we service 12 institutions, we’ve got 12 sets of concerns on campus in regard to facility conflicts and priorities and we just try to meet as many as we can.”

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E-mail the author: Daniel Monson