Archive for October, 2008

The NBA season starts tonight.  For the longest time I considered the NBA a joke.  I thought it was a bunch of extremely talented players running around going 1 on 1 and playing bad defense.  I watched just about every game of the playoffs last year and I’m actually pretty excited about the NBA right now.  ESPN the magazine and SI both have my Bucks having a terrible season.  I hope that’s not the case.  It will be interesting to see how Richard Jefferson and Michael Redd do together.

We’ve been practicing for a little over a week now.  Everything has been going pretty well. My shot is looking pretty good lately and I’ve been working on my defense.  The only bad thing about practice so far is that on the second or third day I hurt my thumb on my shooting hand.  Last year against Appalachian State I partially tore some ligaments (aka a bad sprain).  I played the rest of the season with tape on my shooting hand.  Well the same thing happened and it looks like I’ll be wearing the tape again this year.  Even though its on my shooting hand, it doesn’t affect my shot at all which is obviously really good.

Last week we had an Athletic Service Board meeting.  Every school with Division 1 athletics has one of these. Basically a couple members from each team meet and discuss issues that are important to athletes, put together community service initiatives, help publicize games, and put on events for athletes such as an athlete only field day at the end of the school year. Last week we talked about the annual SoCon fundraiser. For the last few years each school collected the tabs off of soda cans. This year we are going to sell pink shoelaces for $1 in support of the Kay Yow/WBCA Cancer Fund. If you don’t know who Kay Yow you really should watch this video. She was diagnosed with cancer for the 3rd time in November during the 2007 basketball season.  She missed 14 games and came back to coach while still undergoing Chemotherapy.

I’ll be back later on in the week.

Basketball season has officially started now.  We had practice from at 8 on Friday night, again on Saturday at 11 and again today at 1.  We’ve been putting in more of our offense, concentrating more on defense.  We are split into a purple and gray team and we have been keeping score by negative points for turnovers and poor execution and positive points for taking charges, getting loose balls, making shots, and offensive rebounds.  We do this when working on things like transition defense, half court offense and scrimmaging.  We didn’t do this as much last year but I really think it increases the intensity of practice.

After practice today Noah States and I went to a Church in downtown Greenville that was launching their Church league basketball program.  We were only there for a little while but its always fun to be involved with something like that.  I am a Christian and being a good role model is something that is very important to me.

Basketball season is here.  Official practice starts this Friday night.  It seems like every year, guys like Gary Parrish write articles about how programs like Ohio State and other high major basketball programs skip Midnight Madness and have a normal practice instead.  Furman used to have it but we had practice last year instead. We aren’t having it again this year.  I don’t mind not having Midnight Madness. It is no secret that we had a really bad season last year.  If we’re going to have a better season, its going to take alot of things but one of them is being in sync with each other, which comes from practice.

We maxed out in the weight room on Monday and Tuesday. I increased my 1 rep bench press 10 pounds up to 225 (don’t laugh). My vertical leap stayed the same at 30″.  I was able to increase my squat by 20 pounds to 385.  The new bench and squat maxes are personal highs for me.

Tomorrow we have our team picture and weights.  Last year I got alot of grief for my facial hair (Exhibit A) and I was apparently “dangerously close” to not being in our team picture this year. I cleaned up a little bit but I didn’t get rid of the facial hair completely.

I’ll let you know how practice is going in a few days.

Another week has gone by. I was able to go home last weekend for fall break. I had a great time. I had planned on going to Georgia Tech to see some friends from high school but I decided to spend the whole break with my family. We had a TERRIBLE sports weekend. The Brewers were eliminated from the playoffs, the Badgers lost to Ohio State, and the Packers lost to the Falcons.

I got back to Furman on Sunday night. We had a pretty busy week basketball wise. We had three 40 minute practices, lifted 4 times and had conditioning twice. We had a team meeting on Tuesday where Coach Jackson announced a schedule change. We are no longer playing in an event in early December at Drake University. We added games against Dartmouth and at the University of South Carolina.   Dartmouth will be playing us at our place next season, but the best part about the announcement is that we will be hosting South Carolina during my senior season.  Its pretty exciting for us because we should be really good.

I don’t really have any big plans for this weekend. I’m hoping that I can get one win out of either Wisconsin, Green Bay, or my fantasy team. More than one combined win from those 3 is just a bonus.

I just got home for fall break earlier this afternoon.  Unfortunately, this gave me enough time to watch the Brewers lose 3-1 to the Phillies.  After watching the game I headed over to my old high school to pick my brother up from his high school workouts.

Since Furman switched over to the semester calendar instead of the trimester calendar this year, our team is able to go home for Fall Break.   Last year Furman’s Fall Break occurred after the official start of the preseason so we had two-a-days while everyone else was home.  I don’t really have any plans for the break. I’ll probably just watch some baseball and hang out with my family considering this is the last time I’ll be home before Christmas.

Its going to be nice to have some real free time.  I’ve realized that as an athlete, you don’t exactly have much free time at all during the offseason and especially during the season.  You might have big chunks of time where you don’t have any responsibilities but I would call that down time.  There is a big difference between free time and down time.  Usually I have 1-2 hours between class and weights or class and practice.  I can’t do whatever I want in this time because I don’t want to use a whole lot of energy so I’m fresh for practice, so its down time.