The contrast between No. 23 Illinois and its Friday competition, Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, is stark.

While the Illini hail from the Big Ten, a major Division I athletic conference, the 2008 campaign marks the Division I debut of the SIUE Cougars.

And while the Illini (8-2) already faced ranked opponents, the Orange and Blue will be the first ranked Division I opponents for SIUE (2-4).

But the Cougars return a strong lineup, including four seniors who have been four-year starters on a squad that finished No. 14 in Division II play in 2007. Leading the way for the Cougars is a pair of sophomores. Sydney Winslow has 67 kills while hitting .248 on the season. Defensively, Diane Schmidlin has contributed 96 digs on the season.

The Fighting Illini are a challenge Cougars head coach Todd Gober and his squad is taking on for the sake of the seniors.

“Going into this year, we wanted to do something special for our seniors,” Gober said “They’ve been loyal and dedicated, and we’ve won a lot of games. They’ve had a lot of success.

“We had choices of, ‘Do we want to take a special trip and go someplace fun or do we want to give this group of seniors volleyball experience, let them play some of the best competition in the country?’ And they chose to play great competition,” Gober said. “And of course the first team we look for is the University of Illinois.”

The Illini will meet the Cougars at Huff Hall following a prolonged stretch of difficult road matches and very little time to practice in between.

Junior libero Ashley Edinger said that playing on the road has given the team a chance to “get away and just focus on volleyball.” But she added that the late travel and keeping up in classes has been draining.

“We’ve actually been lagging at the beginning of our matches lately, so I think just that energy, the atmosphere (that Huff Hall) brings to us is going to give us an extra boost,” Edinger said.

Illinois head coach Don Hardin agrees that the Illini will have to come out strong Friday.

“(The Cougars) are capable of scrappy play, and we’re going to have to really establish ourselves early against them or they’ll get us in a good match and take us extra games,” Hardin said.

The match is also the final tuneup for Illinois before entering Big Ten play.

“At the end of this stretch, we’ve identified a lot of things we need to work on next week to prepare for the Big Ten season,” Hardin said.

“We basically have next week to heal anything that’s going on with the team while we prepare to shore up all those things that got identified down this stretch.”