It may not seem possible, but the St. Louis University basketball team, one of the youngest in the nation last season with three freshmen regularly starting, will be even younger this season.

When the team starts practice Friday, the unit third-year coach Rick Majerus will work with will have no seniors and no juniors. The 10 players on the court will be four sophomores and six freshmen.

"I can say unequivocally we're the youngest team in America," Majerus said. "Period. We're young and it's going to be a season of learning and growth. I'm excited about the direction the program is going."

If the players Majerus has work out as projected, the SLU program is headed up, though the results likely won't show until next season. But even before practice has begun, the team has hit what could be a major bump. Recruit Cody Ellis, a player Majerus already calls one of his three best players, is still back home in Perth, Australia. ("That's not a good place to be," Majerus said.) Ellis' arrival has been caught up in the NCAA Eligibility Center, which has balked at one of the classes on his transcript, and that has kept him from being eligible. The school and Ellis' family have appealed to the NCAA, and the situation is under review.

Majerus said Ellis still hasn't reached the cutoff for taking fall semester classes, but that time is obviously getting closer every day. If the situation isn't resolved soon, Ellis will miss the fall semester, in which case he wouldn't be eligible to play until the semester ends on Dec. 15, which would keep him out of at least nine games, plus the two exhibitions. And though no one at SLU will say it, the possibility remains that Ellis misses the entire season.

"It's the single most frustrating thing maybe in my coaching career," Majerus said.

Ellis, a 6-foot-8 forward who spent his summer starting on the Australian under-19 team, which finished fourth at the world championships, would have been a major contributor to SLU right from the start. The rest of the recruiting class arrived without incident, including the team's other Aussie, Christian Salecich, and Majerus says they're all in good shape and ready to go.

At least two of them will be starters alongside Kwamain Mitchell, Brian Conklin and Willie Reed, who all of a sudden, along with Kyle Cassity, are the grand old men of the team. (The team's lone junior, Paul Eckerle, tore his ACL in a pickup game and had surgery in August. Though the team is leaving it up in the air, he's likely out for the season.) Femi John, who redshirted last season and then got injured as well, has recovered and Majerus said he's ready to play.

"Being a young team is going to hurt us a bit," said Mitchell, who was named team captain at the end of last season. "Brian, Kyle, Willie and I have to guide the freshmen in a positive path."

A year ago, SLU's Kevin Lisch and Tommie Liddell cited Mitchell as being the freshman most ready to go, and this year, Mitchell thinks that honor goes to Salecich, a 6-3 guard who was a backup on the Aussie U-19 team. "He's been playing basketball for a long time, and he's in good shape," Mitchell said. "He can shoot really well."