For Jeremiah Rivers, it’s about practice

If basketball experience were Behr Pottery Red, Jeremiah Rivers could paint a house. Seriously, the kid has pretty much seen it all.

He’s played in a Final Four. He’s been a part of two of the most storied college basketball programs in history. His dad just won an NBA title in a town that breeds hard-court legends.

It’s translating cleanly.

When Rivers’ teammate Devan Dumes was asked last week who among his new teammates was already stepping up as a leader for a team that will need a few, the answer was instantaneous.

“Jeremiah has,” said the junior college transfer from Indianapolis. “He’s really a competitor and a leader. His game has really elevated.”

There is no doubt Rivers has the most overall experience of anyone on this roster not named Taber.

It certainly would make sense that Rivers would emerge as a leader for the greenest Cream and Crimson squad in recent memory, except for one problem: Rivers can’t play this year.

Transferring in from Georgetown last spring, the Winter Park, Fla., native will have to spend his first season in Bloomington enjoying the best seat in the house.

Still, that hasn’t stopped Rivers from being a vocal, physical – and perhaps most important – willing leader.

“He’s going to be a leader this year, but not this year,” Dumes said, “since he doesn’t get to play. I think his experience will help us a lot on the sideline.”

It might come as a surprise for a fan base so inundated with “me” players of late that there now exists a Hoosier who is a strong and vociferous leader, despite that fact that there’s no playing time in it for him until 2009. It doesn’t shock Matt Hixenbaugh.

Rivers’ coach at Winter Park High School, Hixenbaugh said the Rivers he knew was more of a leader by example, and his willingness to become a vocal and demonstrative leader is a product of all the different success he’s been exposed to lately. Still, Rivers’ newfound player-boss role in Bloomington doesn’t surprise his old coach.

“He really set the bar high on trying to be as good as he can be,” Hixenbaugh said of Rivers’ time in high school. “He had other guys around that were willing to do the same.”

Hixenbaugh, now working for the Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School, said he saw a new side of Rivers this summer as well – a complete, mature one. The coach said he brought two 15-year-old players to meet Rivers, and one of the Hoosiers’ new faces spent time talking to both, working on their game and even taking them to a movie.

“He’s that type of person,” Hixenbaugh said by phone Sunday.

The reasons for Rivers’ transfer – surprising to many when it went down – have remained rather untouched until recently, and even Hixenbaugh admitted he was taken aback at hearing his former player’s decision. Still, Hixenbaugh said Rivers’ relationship with Crean was the lynchpin, something Rivers himself said as well.

Rivers said he came to IU because of a previous relationship with IU coach Tom Crean, who Rivers said used to let him play in open gym with the likes of Travis Diener and Dwyane Wade, if you’d believe it. Like I said, dude’s got experience to fill a dump truck.

His current coach knows it, too.

“I would say because he has been around so many different experiences, Jeremiah Rivers is really trying (to be a leader),” Crean said of Rivers. “But at the same time, I’m gonna coach him like he’s playing every night, and that’s the deal we’ve made. You help me lead the team, and we’re going to coach you like you’re in every game and have the same responsibilities that everybody else would have.”

Something tells me Rivers wouldn’t have it any other way.

See you next Tuesday.