The fifth-ranked Penn State men's volleyball team can handle many things. The Nittany Lions can handle menacing blockers, physical serves and much more on the court, but the discovery that their bus for the weekend road trip has no DVD player is just too devastating.

What's worse, as the team will soon find out, sophomore Kyle Masterson's portable DVD player won't hook up to the televisions on the vehicle, sending a groan throughout the bus as the driver makes a left turn onto Beaver Avenue.

The team's coach, Mark Pavlik, takes this all in stride, and will be content if this is the worst thing that happens on a cold Friday morning on which the Lions will travel to Newark, N.J., to take on Indiana-Purdue at Fort Wayne in the Golden Dome Classic.

"It's 9:16," Pavlik says as he looks at his watch, "and we've already got our first mutiny."

"We'll watch anything, really," co-captain Nate Meerstein said. "From Band of Brothers to Napoleon Dynamite."

This is the volleyball road trip known all too well to non-revenue sports teams. There are no frills, no planes for distances less than 1,000 miles. And now, unthinkably, there is no functioning device that will allow this team to watch Will Ferrell ask if he should pose as "the thinker, or the stinker."

With no film to watch and many of the players yearning to catch up on sleep, the bus falls silent for the better part of the next two-and-a-half hours, as the team travels east on Interstate 80.

About 30 minutes east of the Delaware Water Gap lies the Hibernia Diner, an establishment that Pavlik (called Pav by most players and coaches) takes delight in visiting during each trip to New Jersey.

Junior Matt Proper, who can time his jumps so perfectly that he will take off from the three-meter line and clobber a moving ball onto the other side of the court, is unable to avoid a stationary light fixture hanging from the ceiling. As he gets up from the table to wash his hands, the 6-foot-5 Proper's head and the lighting collide, causing the fixture to swing.

On this day, assistant coach Dennis Hohenshelt is at his comedic best. "He basically walked into that thing with his face," the ninth-year assistant said.

As the people at his table are finishing their lunches, Hohenshelt is far from finished with his comedic routine. Someone steals a line from Animal House, joking that one player and his girlfriend are "engaged to be engaged." This sets Hohenshelt off on a string of jokes that won't end until 10 minutes later when everyone is back on the bus. He doesn't stop until a writer traveling with the team agrees to write a story on the engagement. Meerstein and Proper, meanwhile, double over in laughter as they listen to their teammate get ripped.

This is the volleyball road trip, on which players and coaches depend on each other's company to break up the tedium.

At 1:45 p.m., the bus pulls into the team hotel in Newark. Travel-wise, Meerstein says this is a light road trip. As far as weight is concerned, the trip was light, too -- by one pair of volleyball shoes, to be exact. Retrieving his bag from underneath the bus, defensive specialist Guillermo Fernandez stops in mid-motion, realizing he forgot to pack his volleyball shoes.

The team has one hour after check-in to relax and get taped up for the match at 5 p.m.

Everyone is back on the bus at 3, when co-captain Keith Kowal says the ride to the Golden Dome will give the Lions enough time to play one game of Mafia. In this game, cards are given to players, with certain cards indicating certain roles in the game (e.g. mafia, detective, doctor).

Two minutes into the game, it is easy to see why Kowal is so eager to play -- he's crafty and dominant. The game goes on while the bus driver maneuvers to perform a 17-point turn out of the hotel lot.

This is the volleyball road trip. Pav and Hohenshelt are so used to bus travel that they don't even look up for much of the time the driver is struggling.

The team steps onto the court to warm up at 3:50 p.m. At first, there is very little physical activity, as Hohenshelt tells Kowal that because the senior's future job won't allow him to wear warm-ups to work, it is therefore inferior to his.

With 50 minutes until first serve, the guys are still playing around, seemingly without a care in the world. The reporter mentions to freshman Luke Murray that if the players were not in uniform, and the scoreboard didn't say there were 50 minutes until game-time, then one would never guess that a match was about to be played.

Murray smiled, got up to walk onto the court, and said, "I don't think anybody would."