IU emphasizes mental and physical strength as key area of improvement

Derek Elston can remember being pushed around last year.

The then-freshman forward battled with big men on teams such as Maryland and Ole Miss early in the IU basketball team’s 2009 season, but that was nothing compared to what he ran into Dec. 12.

The Hoosiers, sitting at 4-4 and fresh off a convincing victory against Pittsburgh in New York City, played host to rival Kentucky, an undefeated team early in its run to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament.

Elston was matched up with forwards such as NBA lottery pick-to-be DeMarcus Cousins and a 6-foot-9, 235-pound Patrick Patterson.

They muscled and bullied their way to 44 points in the paint with 28 coming as the Hoosiers wore down in the second half for a 90-73 loss at Assembly Hall. Kentucky finished the game with 30 second-chance points to IU’s six.

“Those dudes were just massive, and I really didn’t compare to them at all,” Elston said. “This year, we’ll just see what happens when I get put on a big guy.”

Bulking up
IU coach Tom Crean had a much gloomier assessment of the physical dominance last season. He said sheer strength was the issue for “well over half” of the Hoosiers’ games last season, and the numbers agree with him.

In Big Ten games alone, IU was outscored in the paint in 12 of 18 contests.
“There were games we just got physically beat up,” Crean said. “You’re never quite sure how much of it is physical and how much of it is mental, and I looked back at it and watched some films, and it was both.”

A large part of that was out of his control. The Hoosiers had six freshmen suiting up last season, four of whom played in the front court.

A year later and one big man down after the transfer of Bawa Muniru, the Hoosiers are maturing physically after an offseason working with new strength and conditioning coach Je’Ney Jackson.

Jackson, most recently a secondary coach with the Southern Mississippi football program, brought his gridiron regime to Cook Hall and is seeing the results come to the forefront.

Elston said he has added 10 to 15 pounds of “legit” weight. Sophomore forward Christian Watford, who added about 10 pounds himself, said junior guard Verdell Jones has “done a remarkable job” getting stronger.

Some players, Elston said, even lost weight while adding muscle.

“These guys aren’t going up against anybody they shouldn’t be going up against,” he said. “Everybody’s going up against strong people, and we’re making it
look good.”

The added bulk will certainly help in a physical Big Ten, something Watford said he learned in a trial by fire last season.

“Some of those guys in the Big Ten, I thought, ‘Man, there’s just no way we are going to get it,’ when I saw those guys,” he said. “But sometimes we did it. It seemed like everybody fought through it, and I’m ready and prepared this year.”

While the conference has its brawn, it works with quite a bit of brain. Elston said compared to exhibition or early non-conference games, scouts get down to the minutest details of every Hoosier’s skill set.

“You go out there, and you kind of toss the ball around — you just want to run some plays and hopefully come up with a win,” he said of the early season games. “But in the Big Ten, everybody knows which shoulder they go over down to which hand they use to shoot with five seconds on the clock.

“When you have just sheer strength, then all that stuff just gets put off to the side, and you just go out there and you finish.”

Before Hoosier Hysteria, Crean said he had a scout from the NBA’s Miami Heat tell him IU has so many more pieces than last year, which Crean tagged to the physical maturation of his team.

He cautioned that, while as his guys grow older, they invariably get bigger, but they still might not be up to par physically with the rest of the conference.

“We’re stronger for us. Relative to everyone else, I’m not so sure,” he said. “We have to do what’s relevant for us right now.”

It’s all mental
Elston can also remember a time when the team’s downtrodden mind won over matter.

Coming off a rough 58-43 loss to Iowa at home, IU was locked in a tie at Illinois with five seconds remaining in regulation. Fighting Illini guard Demetri McCamey floated an arching shot over the Hoosier defenders and into the basket as time expired.

That’s where it all went downhill.

“We thought that even when we give it our all and we can’t win, it’s going to be pretty hard,” Elston said of the heartbreaker. “A lot of mindsets dropped, and I felt like we didn’t try as hard, for whatever reason.”

It was the second of a string of 11 consecutive Big Ten losses, the longest conference losing streak in school history.

Elston admitted that as bad breaks snowballed, the players would get down and couldn’t get back up. He said he would force Crean to take him out of games, because anytime he made a mistake, he couldn’t get over it and would ultimately make another.

But Crean didn’t have the option to go with a more productive lineup. He said players could have lackluster performances, but they would still get on the court because IU lacked depth.

With what he feels like adequate depth now, changing the losing mindset begins first and foremost by creating fierce competition within the program.

“The easiest thing about being an Indiana basketball player the last two years has been playing time,” Crean said. “Practices are hard, classes are not easy...The games are certainly hard, the demands are hard. The easiest thing is to get playing time. Well, now it’s going to become the hardest, if we’re doing the right stuff.”

After a season in which IU ranked seventh in the Big Ten in defensive rebounds, 10th in field goal percentage defense and last in assist-to-turnover ratio, “the right stuff” means flipping the script defensively.

“We have not been a resistance-filled defense, and we’ve got to become more of that,”
Crean said. “That’s when we can really start to take some steps.”

To do so, mental and physical toughness will need to merge. And Crean said the internal competition, combined with a demand for support and encouragement, will help breed the former.

“That takes time for a young team, because it gets territorial, and it will continue to get that way,” Crean said. “That’s not a bad thing. It’s only a bad thing if they don’t understand that the battle lines are inside the lines of the court, they’re not everywhere else. But I don’t know any great program that doesn’t have real internal competition on the practice floor to make it better.”

Elston said coaches get very repetitive when going over defense, sometimes keeping the players in defensive drills for an hour straight to get it right.

Crean said he wasn’t as worried about implementing offensive strategy this offseason as he was in the past, because he was determined to build a defense that could create offense with turnovers and rebounds.

Because the Hoosiers know they are stronger and faster, Elston said there is no excuse for not crashing the boards.

“It’s not new by any means. Last year we were doing the same things,” Elston said. “But this year, we have so many kids who are athletic. We just feel like if you don’t go, then you don’t even deserve to be on the court.”

Setting a foundation
As the No. 41 player ranked nationally by Rivals.com, Watford was the highest rated player in IU’s 2009 recruiting class. He knew every move a forward needed to know, but he said mental toughness, to him, was a vague term.

“Coming in last year, I really didn’t know what that was,” Watford said. “A lot of freshmen didn’t know what it was. But I started and played every game last year, and I feel like I’m a lot more experienced than the average freshman.”

As Crean hits the recruiting trail, he said he is looking for players who already have what he’s trying to instill in his current team: a winning mindset.

Winning, Crean said, automatically gives a player mental toughness; it comes from doing all the little things he isn’t required to do.

“If I’ve got to make a choice between a guy that plays really hard and competes, but maybe isn’t in the gym as much as he should be, or a guy who’s in the gym all the time but is a little passive and soft when he plays, give me the guy that works hard and competes every time. We’ll put him in an atmosphere where he has to work that much harder.”

If that atmosphere forms quickly, the Hoosiers could be the ones doing the pushing this time.