While Rec Hall, now home of the No. 3 Penn State women's volleyball team, has always been a sports complex, the home of the Hoosiers, the U-School Gym in Bloomington, Ind., used to be part of a laboratory.

After playing in front of 4,419 attendees at Rec Hall on Wednesday, the Nittany Lions boarded a plane yesterday afternoon to Indiana for their match against the Hoosiers (9-15, 2-10 Big Ten) at 8 tonight.

"It's like a camping trip if you know what I'm saying," Penn State women's volleyball coach Russ Rose said of the trek.

The University Gym in Bloomington isn't one of the more intimidating environments in college athletics.

Before being taken over by the Indiana Athletics program, it was part of the local middle school.

It holds a capacity crowd of 2,000 people, 581 people short of Penn State's average attendance for a match.

Indiana averages about 608 fans per match, the size of the larger lecture classes at Penn State.

There isn't much prep time for this extensive in-class lab in rival combustion.

Rose and his staff will have limited amount of time to put together their gameplan for handling the ever-transforming Hoosiers.

"They changed their system since we last played them," Rose said.

"But I'd like to think that the kids understand the importance of playing well on the road."

The Lions (22-2, 13-0 Big Ten) have gotten their best grades all season from Rose while on the road.

While Rose had complained of a lack of energy in early games at home, Penn State has dominated while being the guests, lecturing their opponents on the ways of winning.

Visiting then-No. 12 Minnesota on Oct. 22, the Lions won the first game of the match, 30-9, hitting .370 while holding the Gophers to a -.275 output.

That was before a packed house in Minneapolis, with 4,023 in attendance.

Indiana can't draw that kind of crowd -- even if the members of the crowd decided to sit on each other's laps they would be 23 bodies short -- but teams always play better when they don't have to skip town to play a match.

"Everybody's good at home," Rose said.

No matter how well the Hoosiers play, it most likely won't be enough to beat the Lions.

Penn State leads the Big Ten in hitting percentage and opponent hitting percentage, while Indiana is the complete opposite, sitting on the bottom of conference rankings.