University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Tar Heels Expect More Advanced Preseason
October 11, 2007 | Men's Basketball
Oct. 11, 2007
By Adam Lucas
Saturday morning, Roy Williams will gather the newest edition of his Carolina basketball team. The cushioned seats will be pushed back and extra goals will be pulled onto the floor. They'll go through some preliminary warmup drills--not drills with no application to the game, but drills that subtly teach principles Williams will later emphasize--and then assemble around the center jump circle painted on the floor of the Smith Center.
That's when something unusual will happen: for the first time since the fall of 2004, Carolina's head basketball coach won't have to explain anything.
For three of Williams's previous four seasons in Chapel Hill, the first month of preseason practice has been an extended crash course in the way he wants his teams to play the game. The first season, 2003-04, everyone was new to each other. The next year is what qualifies to this point as a veteran-laden squad--only freshmen Quentin Thomas and Marvin Williams were new. After winning a national title, the next preseason saw David Noel breaking in five new freshmen. There was so little experience that the Tar Heels squeezed in a preseason trip to the Bahamas just to get extra practice time. And last year six new freshmen joined the squad.
This is also the first time in Williams's Tar Heel head coaching career that he won't have to break in at least one freshman point guard (Raymond Felton might have been a sophomore in the fall of 2003, but he was a freshman in Williams's world). All three lead guards on the roster--Thomas, Bobby Frasor, and Ty Lawson--have at least a year of experience.
"Having three point guards who have been there and been through the fire is like a head start for this team," Marcus Ginyard says.
"We'll be able to get right into things this year," Wayne Ellington says. "Last year, we were freshmen and maybe Coach didn't expect as much from us. We were still learning. This year, we're sophomores and juniors and we already know what it takes."
Knowing what it takes has two distinct parts. First, players with more experience take preseason conditioning more seriously. Jonas Sahratian put the team through their final conditioning test Wednesday night. Several of last year's freshmen have made noticeable advancements in their physical readiness. That translates to a team with more endurance on the practice court. A tired team is a team that gives in physically and mentally; a team that gives in is one that is certain to draw Williams's ire in practice.
Lawson didn't arrive on campus with much of an attraction to the weight room. But his first season of college basketball taught him a lesson, and when he returned home after summer school he worked out with a personal trainer and did individual workouts on a treadmill.
"What I realized last year is that everyone is talented in college," Lawson says. "The last couple years before my freshman year, I just got by on talent. I never did things like weight training. Now I'm working on the little things."
Then, of course, there's the obvious shortened learning curve. Part of one preseason practice last year was spent explaining such simple elements as the pregame warmup routine. Shoot layups here. Dive on the floor there. Leave the locker room at this time. It's not that Williams accepted mistakes last season. But he did have to constantly remind himself that he was working with one of the youngest teams in Carolina history.
Those types of explanations will be minimal this year.
"No matter how many freshmen you have, there's always that early period of getting back into things," Bobby Frasor says. "But practice-wise, we should be more advanced early, and that should correlate to better play on the court."
The natural assumption is that more advanced practices only pay dividends early in the season. Perhaps this Carolina team will be sharper in mid-November than last year's freshman-heavy squad.
But there can also be long-term ramifications for a team that has to move slowly through early sessions.
"Things will go faster this year," Ginyard says. "We'll get through a lot more of our plays. We'll get through more of our defensive sets. Last year we weren't able to put in defensive sets that we ran my freshman year because we didn't feel like the whole team grasped the concepts. We'll expand what we can do on offense and defense this year."
That's beneficial in October. But it might even pay dividends in March.
Adam Lucas most recently collaborated on a behind-the-scenes look at Carolina Basketball with Wes Miller. The Road To Blue Heaven will be released on October 1. Lucas's other books on Carolina basketball include The Best Game Ever, which chronicles the 1957 national championship season, Going Home Again, which focuses on Roy Williams's return to Carolina, and Led By Their Dreams, a collaboration with Steve Kirschner and Matt Bowers on the 2005 championship team.
