Archive for September, 2008

Today at workouts Coach Jackson let us know that the Reddick brothers verbally committed to our program.  This is extremely exciting for me and the team.  I was the host when these guys came to town and instantly I could tell that they would fit in great with our program.  I was really impressed with the maturity of the Reddicks.  On their visit, I kept forgetting that they were actually 2 grades younger than me.  Colin is a 6-9 post player and his brother Charlie is a 6-4/6-5 guard/small forward.  They are also from the metro Atlanta area not too far from me.  I’m going to try to update my blog alot more now that our official preseason is only a couple weeks away.

I’ve had a pretty busy week.  Basketball is picking up slowly (Read: Increasing from 90% of my time by about 2 percentage points every week). We’ve still been lifting 4 days a week and we have our stretching program 3 days a week.  We’ve still been playing pickup and like I said in a previous post, we are allowed 2 hours of full team practice per week. Today we worked on putting in our offense.  Like the start of every season it took us a while to get the hang of it.  Our freshmen have been working hard and will help give us a stronger presence down low this season.

I had a test in computer science on Wednesday and I was also supposed to give a speech on Wednesday in my public speaking class.  We didn’t have time so I am giving it on Friday instead.  The assignment was to give a speech on a process. One girl brought in an actual baby and showed how to change a diaper, another showed how to get stains out, and a guy in the class showed how to change a tire.  I’m going with how to shoot a free throw.  While researching for the speech I found out a crazy statistic: Wilt Chamberlain, the NBA’s 4th all time leading scorer, shot 51.1 percent from the charity stripe for his career.  In the game he scored 100 points, he made 38-42.   How in the world was he able to do that but overall have a career 51.1 free throw percentage?

Tonight is the season premiere of my favorite TV show, The Office.  I was pretty disappointed overall with season 4. I am chalking this up to the writers strike. Hopefully they have gotten everything together for season 5.  The promos for the premiere looked great and I’m looking forward to relaxing and watching it tonight.

While it is technically not the preseason yet, the college basketball preseason starts the day you step on campus.  Like I said earlier, we started playing pickup, lifting, and individual workouts almost right after we got to school.  Now we are able to have very limited ammounts of practice as a team and start conditioning.  The first few days of conditioning are always rough. I was a little worried about how I’d do since I did have sinus surgery over the summer but I’m glad to say I was 100% and was able to finish the sprints in the time allowed.  We had our first day of “practice” tonight and it went pretty well. It only lasted 40 minutes but we got some good work done.  Its good to not be a freshman anymore and I feel like I am playing with more confidence now that I know what I am doing.

I had a pretty low-key weekend.  I watched alot of football.  I don’t know how I felt about the Ohio State USC game. I cannot stand the Buckeyes.  I have alot of friends that are big OSU fans and I am a Wisconsin fan so you can see where I would get sick of the Buckeyes winning the Big Ten.  On the other hand, watching them get killed I could already hear the SEC and PAC-10 idiots calling the Big Ten weak for the rest of the season.  Wisconsin took care of Fresno State.  They barely won but that’s not an easy place to play and the announcers pointed out that numerous PAC-10 teams have canceled on Fresno because they didn’t want to play there.

I had to watch the packers game on Gamecast. It was great to see Aaron Rodgers lead the Packers to the win.  Maybe the most importantly, my fantasy team won this week. I don’t think I could have afforded starting off 0-2.

I’ll check back in soon.

Connor

NFL season is finally here.  I’m a huge football fan and I probably like college football season more than the NFL but I can’t get into the first few weeks of the college season. This is probably because my team, the Wisconsin Badgers, plays a pretty weak schedule in the first weeks of the season.  I can’t wait for tonight’s Packers game.

I had a great weekend.  I ended up going home during the day on Saturday. My brother and sister both had fall league basketball games so I got to see them play.  They both won so that was good. My brother had a big week last week. He got his first recruiting letter which happened to be from Danny Manning from the Kansas Jayhawks.  I’m extremely happy for him but have been trying to tell him how important it is for him to not let that get to his head in the least bit. Then on Saturday night I came back to Greenville and saw one of my favorite bands, Needtobreathe, in concert.  They were awesome as usual and I really liked the guy that opened for them, Andy Davis.

While I was home I picked up my Favre Jets Jersey that came in.  I was happy to see him succeed yesterday.  I am remaining a huge Favre fan even though he’s on the Jets.  I really hope someday the truth comes out about what really happened behind closed doors with the whole nasty Favre/Packers divorce. There had to be some crazy stuff going on for it to come to this.

Sunday I watched football all day and went to my individual workout at 4:40.  I was pretty happy with the workout. We worked on alot of ballhandling and I can tell major improvements from our post season workouts last year.  I’m about to head over to the gym for weights and pick up.

I’ve been up at school for a week now and I’m pretty much situated.  We’ve been working hard the last week and I’m getting excited for the season to start.  We’ve been having really competitive pickup games and our individuals have been intense.  We maxed out last week and as usual my bench was weak but my squats were respectable. My vertical leap was a massive 30 inches.

The Furman football team had their first football game and they destroyed Mars Hill. The final score was 62-14.  My mom came up for the game to see some of the redshirt freshmen I’m friends with that she knows and also to see me go out on the field at halftime. I, along with about 30 other Furman athletes, was announced for being on the Southern Conference honor roll.  In the second quarter Furman’s best receiver, R.J. Webb came out of the game and seemed to be favoring his left knee.  I took this to be a good sign considering he tore his right ACL last year and this meant he didn’t injure his right knee again. Turns out, he tore the ACL on his left knee and had meniscus damage. Hearing that news was some of the most depressing news I’ve heard in a long time.  I’ve been in the training room watching him rehab his knee for the past 5+ months and to see him go down with another ACL tear makes me sick to my stomach.