Hey folks,
Tom Crean was up at Lucas Oil Stadium (which is HUGE, if you haven't seen it from the inside) for the official announcement of The Hartford Hall of Fame Showcase in December, which will officially "open" Lucas Oil's basketball showcasing career. Or whatever.
Anyway, IU will face Gonzaga in game one of the Dec. 6 event, with Ohio State and Notre Dame to follow close behind. Crean chatted with reporters after the official announcement ceremony, the bulk of which is transcribed in Q&A format below. A few quick highlights, however: -The team put together a 3.34 GPA for the semester, according to Crean. The coach did say, however, that between classes and practice, "The hard part hasn't even started yet." -Kyle Taber is still on track to be back around 10 weeks from his surgery, previously reported in this space. Crean said the senior is in between the "eighth and ninth week," adding that "there's been nothing that's led us to believe it's going to be anything less than 10 weeks. That could change." -Crean said the team will have walk-on tryouts -- four at a time per NCAA rules, until Sept. 15 -- and he said he and his coaching staff will be looking to add walk-ons. -I have a question down at the bottom of the Q&A about leaders emerging for the Hoosiers. Crean did single out Jeremiah Rivers and Nick Williams as emerging team leaders, though I included only the broader part of Crean's answer to that question. I'll have something further about Rivers for you in my Tuesday column.
Read on, and take it easy.
Men's Basketball Notebook
Tom Crean Q&A in Indianapolis
How does it feel to have everyone on campus and working out now?
I finally feel like a basketball coach again. I really do. To be out on the court, and be in the workouts - we'll start the conditioning this weekend. We've had two one-hour workouts with one more group to go this weekend, and it's been fun. It's been really good to put things in perspective for us, as we've got to build very slow and gradual, don't speed it up. Be very, very focused on not assuming anything with any player.
We can't coach this like they understand what we're trying to so. We've got to go very slow and make sure we don't skip any steps.
Could you talk a little bit about your schedule, which has you facing Gonzaga here at Lucas Oil Field, includes trips to Wake Forest and the Maui Invitational and sees you go on the road plenty early in the Big Ten schedule? I look back at it out now, and I wish to a degree, that I would have said, 'Hey, do we need to play this team or that team?' Contracts were done, you know, it was one of those situations where there was so much going on, the schedule was it was going to be.
It's the way that it is. There's no way you can say no to this. I don't think you can. It would really, really be a bad feeling to be sitting at home and watching somebody else open Lucas Oil (Field). That had to happen, the Kentucky game was gonna be there. Do I wish we were at home for an ACC game? I do, but that's not the way the schedule works, they had a home game last year. Maui, you know, as much as we're going to be challenged in that, how do you not take your kids to Maui?
So there weren't many issues where we could look at it and make many changes. If you went through all the changes that we had inside of our team, every team is going to be an incredibly tough opponent right now.
Any message for the team now that everyone's together?
They have to understand three things, really. No. 1, they're part of an incredible tradition, there's no doubt about that. They don't totally know what that means yet, but they're learning it.
No.2, they've got to come in and they've got to get used to college life. They've got to come in and get used to what it means to an Indiana basketball player at a school of 38,000.
Really, No. 3, they have to make up - I don't want them to be held accountable for what the perception might have been in the past - but they have to be very cognizant of that. There are some people that were in the program that didn't represent the school the way it should have been represented, that's the way it is. I don't want them to feel pressure because of that, but I want them to understand that, and that means that we really have to work as hard as we can to do the right thing all the time.
Are you working hands-on with team workouts?
Absolutely. That's why we're not doing one (Friday), the last group will wait til this weekend. I don't wanna miss those. I would say we'll time it as close as we possibly can to me not missing any with the recruiting period.
The worst mistake we could make is to try to just be out all the time and recruiting right now. The most important team is the one that's back there. Don't get me wrong, we have to be recruiting. Seven o'clock, Tuesday morning, we'll be watching a young guy lift weights. We'll be out and about, but we've got to coach these guys, so I don't miss those things.
How has this experience changed you as a coach?
The one place where it's been good for me is that my tendency is to go fast, teach the whole and then add the parts as we go, really try to get that tempo. When you have a veteran team, when you have players that have been around, even when we had the young guys at Marquette and we knew they were gonna play Jerel McNeal, Dominic James and Wesley Matthews, we still had a guy like Steve Novak, who's in the NBA. We still had a couple of seniors. We don't have that now, so we have to go really slow, and that's good. I think Tim Buckley does a good job of keeping me in line on that making sure that we're not moving too fast.
Who's stepping up as a leader with all the new players?
It's too early to tell, because we haven't been around them as a whole on the court. That starts after Sept. 15 and that starts in conditioning.
Your leadership comes in many different forms. First and foremost, right now, they've got to lead themselves and get through the workouts. What they think is hard and what they think is challenging isn't even close to how you really do it when you're really trying to reach a level.
I think as guys get their conditioning down, I think as guys get their bearings a little bit, the leadership will start to emerge.
