PHOENIX – Arizona State basketball coach Herb Sendek isn’t traveling anywhere over the winter break.

That’s because he and the Sun Devils have already been on the road a lot so far this season, a trend that will continue into 2011.

“We really don’t have a great deal of time before or after to do too much traveling or anything like that,” Sendek told Doug and Wolf on Tuesday. “We play games right up to the doorstep and right afterwards we get ready for Pac-10 play.”

Sendek has allowed himself a small vacation of sorts though.

“I’ve been on a tweet vacation, and I really got to get back at it,” Sendek said. “I was going at Twitter pretty good and having some fun with it and then the season started and I’ve been on a hiatus.”

Other that, ASU has been hard at work hitting the road for games and trying to improve their defense.

Sendek said he was pleased with the team’s work on defense in its last game against Gardner-Webb, but there are still improvements to be made.

“The truth is we still have a great deal of work ahead of us and we’ve got to be much better still,” Sendek said. “Gardner-Webb is a good team, but obviously not of the caliber of some of the teams we had been playing.”

Sendek believes that the work the team puts in on the defensive end now, coupled with the team’s early road schedule will pay dividends down the line.

“We just felt like it’s what our program needed now,” Sendek said. “It’s what our young team needed to experience.

“We’re going to have to fight our way through it, because we come back home for two games before Christmas and then we start the Pac-10 season back on the road.”

ASU will be on the road Friday at Nevada for its next game.

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