Wichita ? At 41 years old, Mark Turgeon already wears the permanently creased brow of the professional worrier.

Wichita State’s coach first worried he was taking a jinxed job, then wondered if he could turn around the Shockers’ fortunes. He still frets so much about upcoming opponents that he won’t watch film on them until two days before a game – otherwise he can’t sleep.

“I work out of fear,” he says. “I’m a nervous guy.”

Turgeon isn’t worried, though, that the 10th-ranked Shockers, suddenly the nation’s hottest mid-major team, will be overcome by their first Top 10 spot since 1982.

“The only thing that would scare me is if they would start to change,” Turgeon said Thursday. “I don’t think they’re going to. I’d see it creeping in. We’ll try not to allow it, and I think they’re mature enough not to allow it.”

Senior forward Ryan Martin agreed.

“I don’t think we’re going to let the success get to our heads,” he said. “We’ve still got a lot to prove and got a lot of things we want to accomplish – winning the conference again and winning the conference tournament, which Coach has never done since he’s been here.”

Wichita State is no overnight sensation. The Shockers have been a work in fairly steady progress since Turgeon took over in 2000.

Some steps were smaller than others, especially in the early going.

Turgeon’s first team went 9-19, continuing a decade-long string of mediocre finishes for a once-proud program that reached the Final Four in 1965 and made six NCAA Tournament appearances from 1976 to 1988.

“That’s the thing about college basketball – when you’re bad, you’re bad for a whole season,” Turgeon said.

And so he worried some more – but he also remembered why he took the job, despite seeing Wichita State’s three previous coaches fired.

Wichita State's Wendell Preadom, top, and P.J. Couisnard go for a rebound in this file photo from Nov. 29 in Wichita. The Shockers are in the AP Top 10 for the first time since 1982.

“People are passionate about basketball here,” said Turgeon, a Topeka native who played at Kansas University and was an assistant to Larry Brown when the Jayhawks won the 1988 national championship. “That’s what I grew up with. That’s all I know. I’ve been places where they weren’t, and that’s really hard. I knew enough people cared here that they could make things happen, financially.”

Then came the successes: 15 wins in Turgeon’s second season, NIT berths in the next three years and the Shockers’ breakout season in 2006. They went 26-9, won the Missouri Valley championship and reached the NCAA regional semifinals for the first time since making the round of eight in 1981.

“We’ve gotten used to expectations over the past three or four years,” said Turgeon, who signed a 10-year contract extension in April that makes him one of the highest-paid coaches in the Missouri Valley Conference. “That’s just part of our program maturing.”

Wichita State was among the “others receiving votes” coming into this season, despite losing center Paul Miller, the Valley’s player of the year, to graduation.

It didn’t take the Shockers long to break into the poll, ranking No. 24 on Nov. 20. They’ve been moving up in big chunks since then.

The road wins that propelled Wichita State to the Top 10 came on successive Saturdays. Two of them came against teams that finished last season playing on college basketball’s biggest stage.

On Nov. 18, the Shockers won 76-64 at George Mason.

Then came the real stunners: a 57-53 victory at then-No. 6 Louisiana State on Nov. 25, followed by a 64-61 win a week later at then-No. 15 Syracuse.

“We won the first one, and people were like, ‘Oh, that’s good, that was a good win,”‘ senior forward Kyle Wilson. “Then we beat LSU, and they were like, ‘Oh, OK.’

“But you do it three straight times, and people start really turning their heads and noticing what we’re doing.”

The two most recent wins made Wichita State the first Valley team to beat two ranked opponents on the road since the Associated Press began issuing its poll in January 1949.

But if Wichita State played in, say, the Big 12 or the Pac-10, how high might they be ranked on the strength of those wins – especially with Kansas still at No. 12 despite losses to unranked Oral Roberts and DePaul?

“I made the comment, and it was in the Lawrence paper, that if we had lost to DePaul and Oral Roberts we wouldn’t even be in the top 50,” Turgeon said. “That was no disrespect to KU. That just shows you how hard it is for us.

“Creighton won’t get any votes, and Creighton’s a heck of a team. They’re going to figure it out and be right there in our league, but they won’t get any votes this week because they have two losses.”