Upon returning from his first Big Ten road trip as a head coach, Ed DeChellis brought back a few souvenirs.

"Here, take a look at what some other schools are doing," the first-year Penn State men's basketball coach said while distributing some papers to local media at his weekly press conference.

The papers were actually two newsletters by the names of The Full Court Press and Hoop Scoop, which came from Michigan and Illinois, respectively.

They were propaganda for the infamous Maize Rage and Orange Crush basketball student sections -- game plans that included chants, cheers and player-specific taunts.

And while he hasn't had a direct role in creating something similar at Penn State, it's fair to say that DeChellis wants to see it happen.

"I think our students are vital to us," he said. "They're very important to us. Michigan had a pretty good thing going. They were on Jan [Jagla] the whole game."

But in a game against Northwestern, students arrived to find a surprise on their seats -- "Forty Minutes: The Official Playbook of Penn State Basketball's Sixth Man."

Created by Justin Casavant, Forty Minutes has appeared at the past four home games and recently made its Lady Lions debut last week against Michigan.

"I've been thinking about doing something like this for awhile," Casavant said. "There's a Web site [www.psuplaybook.org] that had a challenge out there to create a newsletter, so I thought, 'let's try this.' It started at the Northwestern game and it just snowballed."

The whole enterprise started with $128 worth of copies at Kinko's and has taken off ever since. Perhaps the letter's greatest triumph came in the Illinois game last Saturday in front of a national TV audience.

"It definitely helped that it was a big game," Casavant said. "The fans were a lot more receptive."

The crowd and the student section in particular, responded with the most energy of the season -- and DeChellis and his players took notice.

"I thought the crowd was great," DeChellis said. "The students were tremendous. When you're not winning games, it's real easy to just pack it in, but the fans didn't do that. There was a lot of energy in that building."

Freshman guard Marlon Smith who had been feeling the burden of his huge number of minutes in recent weeks said that he didn't feel the fatigue in this game, running on adrenaline that was partly fueled by the crowd.

"I thought it was by far the best [crowd] of the season. By far," he said. "They had our back the whole way."

As for the future of Forty Minutes, Casavant said that he is looking to work with the athletic department for support and hopes to create a single student group at games.

"I've gotten several e-mails and some stuff from the athletic department," he said. "They're willing to support and help through things like t-shirts to start a new student section. We're trying to generate interest in a multi-sport student section for men's and women's basketball -- maybe replace the Ed-Heads and Rene's Rowdies with one unified group."