Yesterday we had the day off from practice. I had a few errands to take care of so I took advantage of the afternoon. I got my haircut and went to Walmart to restock my room’s food and Gatorade supply. The Salvation Army bell ringers were outside the doors collecting donations and there were numerous Christmas displays throughout the store. They were also playing Christmas music. Is it just me or is it a little early for Christmas music? Time really is flying and I can’t believe that its already November 19th, but I don’t start thinking about Christmas until my calendar says December.

Today is probably one of the busier days I’ve had this year. I had class from 9:30-10:30. Got some lunch around 12. Had class from 12:30-1:30. Had a computer science lab from 2:30-4:30 and practice at 5:30. In my public speaking class we had an interesting assignment. Todays topic was Eulogies. Our assignment was to give a eulogy at our own funeral. I didn’t present mine today but I wrote the outline and it was really weird. I have no idea what I am going to do with my life so it was hard to imagine what somebody would say about my life.

I’m going out to eat tonight at a pizza place in downtown Greenville, Bellacinos with a couple of my teammates.  I get to sleep in tomorrow so I’m looking forward to that.

Last night we lost to Charleston Southern. They played well and capitalized on our mistakes. We definitely feel like we could have won the game. Coach stressed that unforced errors did us in. CSU went up by 10 or so in the first half and we ended up cutting it to 5 at the half. In the second half, they were up by as many as 15, and we cut it down to 3 with about 7 minutes to go. It hovered around 3-5 for a couple of minutes and they made some big shots to seal the victory. Jamarco Warren, their point guard was on fire. It seemed like he didn’t miss.

9:10 AM: We woke up this morning at 8:15 to get breakfast and now I’m back in my room watching some SportsCenter.  We’re leaving at 9:40 for our shootaround.  I don’t know if our coaches picked a 10:00 AM shootaround or if that was just the time slot Charleston Southern gave us. I do know that 8:15 is earlier than I have to wake up on days that I have class.

1:00 PM: We had a good shootaround. Charleston Southern uses Spalding balls instead of the Nike balls that Furman, and the majority of teams we play use. Its not really a big deal, but some guys hate using the Spalding balls cause they have a tendency to get slippery. We went over a few plays to make sure everybody is on the same page. Now we’re probably going to go to the mall to kill some time. Its good to get out and about instead of lounging around the hotel all day long.

4:30 PM: We just finished our pregame meal and now we’re hanging out in our hotel rooms. The food we ordered was delivered 20 minutes late but it was ok because we went over Charleston Southern’s personnel again. I guess there is a women’s game before ours tonight so our game will probably end up starting at 7:45. We are only going to have 30 minutes on the floor to warm up before we play. Normally we warm up for about 75 minutes on the floor with a two 7-10 minute breaks thrown in. I usually can’t wait to play so I’m looking forward to a shorter warm up. This should be a good game tonight. I played with Charleston Southern’s PG, Tovi Bailey, in an All-Star game after our senior year of high school. The West team included me Tovi (Charleston Southern), Bryson Barnes (Furman), Charles Corbin (Winthrop), Trevor Gaskins (Ole Miss), Chris Barnes (UGA), Jahaziel Howard (UCF), and myself. We went up against and lost to the East which included Kevin Anderson (Richmond), Zach Graham (Ole Miss), Lance Storrs (Georgia Tech), Jeremy Price (UGA), Terrell Bell (Virginia Tech), Andrew Goudelock (College of Charleston), Marshon Brooks (Providence), Jeremy Simmons (College of Charleston), and Zac Swansey (UGA).

Tomorrow we play Emory, a D3 team from Atlanta.   We had a good practice today and I think everybody is just ready to get the season underway.  We’ve had a long time to think about our 7-23 record from last year. Last season wasn’t fun for anybody and we’ve been working hard since last year’s conference tournament loss to Elon to prevent it from happening again.

I watched the Jets-Pats game tonight.  It was awesome to see Favre lead the Jets to the overtime win.  Its amazing how many times he has led his team to victory in the 4th quarter and OT.  I still can’t believe the Packers kicked him to the curb.

I realized I won’t be in class on Monday considering we’re playing at Charleston Southern that night.  This means that I have to do the flash animation project that’s due Monday in Computer Science tomorrow instead of at the last minute on Sunday night like I would have done.  I’m using a picture of me shooting a free throw and making the ball move across the picture simulating a shot. I’ll put it on here sometime if I can figure out how to do it.

Here is a list of 3 players I’m looking forward to watching this season. I played against all 3 of them in high school and can’t wait to see how they do this year.

Gani Lawal - Georgia Tech:
I had the opportunity to play with and against Gani while I was in high school. I played on the same team as him at a Rivals.com Georgia Hoops Showcase the summer before our Junior years of high school. We were in the last game of the day and it pitted Gani up against J.J. Hickson at the center position. This game represented everything wrong with AAU politics in Georgia. Gani played for the Georgia Stars throughout high school and J.J. played with the Worldwide Renegades. Representatives from both AAU crews went back and forth all game. Apparently JJ scored 50. This was our 3rd game of the day and there was hardly transition defense played. Probably 14-20 of those points from JJ came on uncontested dunks. Nobody seems to remember that Gani and my team ended up winning, they only bring up JJ scoring 50. Anyways, I’m looking for Gani to have a great season at Tech this year. He is a class act and one of the nicest guys I’ve played against.

Chris Allen- Michigan State:
Chris Allen is probably tied with Stephen Curry as the best shooter I’ve ever seen. He doesn’t miss. His Meadowcreek team knocked my Milton team out of the state playoffs in the sweet sixteen to end my Junior season. Even though I’m a Wisconsin fan, I can’t wait to see Chris succeed in the Big Ten. He may not be the first option on that team considering he’s part of a very talented Spartan group, but I think he’ll find ways to put up good numbers.

Chris Singleton - Florida State:
I played against Chris Singleton for his Freshman, Sophomore, and Junior years in high school. He played at Cherokee High School, a team in our region. He was a Mickey D’s All American last year. I’m not gonna lie, I though he was a great player and I knew he’d go play at a big school, but I never would have guessed he’d be a McDonalds All-American. I’m very interested to see how he does against ACC competition.

We had our exhibition game tonight. We played Newberry College, a D2 program. We got off to a slow start but ended up winning by around 20. This was much different from last years exhibition where we lost to USC-Aiken. Hopefully this will set a much different tone for the season. I was happy with how I played. I shot the ball well and also rebounded well. All week in practice our coaches were trying to get Noah States and I ready to guard their best player, Clement Martin. I think he ended up having 14 points but was only 3-10 from the floor. Our freshmen played well and I think it was good for them to get experience in a game atmosphere. My sister and my dad came up along with my dad’s parents. Its always good for us players to see our families every now and then.

We are going to practice tomorrow and go over some film. Tonight I’m just going to hang out with some of the guys and enjoy the win.

This weekend our team headed up to Charlotte to scrimmage VMI.  We practiced Saturday morning, lifted weights and left for Charlotte Saturday evening.  Charlotte isn’t a bad trip from Furman at all. It took us about an hour and 45 minutes on the bus.  When we got to Charlotte we got dinner at Macaroni Grill.  By the time we left dinner and got to the hotel I was completely exhausted.  My roommate for the trip was Tony Anderson, a redshirt junior point guard.  We watched the end of the Texas Tech - Texas game and fell asleep.

We woke up at 7:45 to get some breakfast and we were at UNC-Charlotte by 9.  We scrimmaged in their practice gym but I took a peek at their main gym.  It was WAY bigger than I would have expected.  Their arena looked about the size of UGA’s Stegeman Coliseum.

We knew VMI would be aggressive and press alot but we were not expecting them to do it on every possession.  It was a little disappointing because we were unable to run our man offense at all (due to them being in zone all day long).  It was fun to finally play somebody other than ourselves though.

I’m really glad that basketball season has started so I can stop following football.  Wisconsin’s football team has been a huge disappointment this year to say the least.  They might get into a bowl game if they win out.  The Packers lost a close one to the Titans and are now tied for second in the division.  My fantasy football team lost this week unless Clinton Portis can score 22 points for me tonight.

It should be a good week of practice this week as we prepare for our exhibition game against Newberry this Friday.

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.