MU Basketball

Wednesday, Jan. 16 was the first conference game of the men's varsity season. The atmosphere was just as electric as I remember from my playing days. The transition from player to coach has taken a lot to get used to. The coaches and staff have made the transition very comfortable, since the beginning of the 2007 academic year I was no longer a fellow teammate, I was introduced as one of the men's basketball coaches. As a member of the coaching staff my duties where clearly defined. I was put in charge of coordinating the study hall program by monitoring student-athletes and receiving progress reports from instructors every other week. I was also put in charge of coordinating all junior varsity practices. I designed all JV practices and implemented all drills under the supervision of my coordinator, Assistant Head Coach, Tim Ryerson.
For the fall semester I was strictly the JV coach, I attended some varsity home games and was on call if they needed a van driver. I was given the opportunity to head coach my own team. The JV season started on October 24, 2007 in a exhibition game against the Army travel team, I was finally put in the position that I looked up to all my basketball career. Now I was the one the players came to, the one they wanted attention from and the one who controlled all their hoop dreams in the palm of my hand. Of course my supervisors Coach Ryerson and Head Coach, David Smith prepared me before I took on such a task. We would meet every Monday and Wednesday at 11am to talk basketball and discuss the things that the MU basketball program were trying to accomplish for the up and coming year and beyond.
The JV team had 8 games scheduled for the fall, 3 of those games away. Such intense coaching and going to school was indeed difficult, but it taught me many lessons in the importance of time management, player/people management, organization, communication, discipline and preparation. I learned that in coaching much like everything else a person never stops learning and a coach has to be able to control their emotions because the team takes on the personality of their coach. By the end of the fall season my team which consisted of mostly freshman and players needing more development ended 2-6. Some would look at the record and think that was bad but, my team overcame many obstacles and grew as I grew, ultimately becoming much better players and even better people. The fall JV season was over but my coaching experience was only just beginning.
I was now required to attend varsity practices and games. Since the fall JV season ended on December 5, 2007 I had the whole Christmas break to jump right into the varsity swing of things. Varsity is a lot more fast paced the JV of course but being a former player I adjusted very well. Again meetings with Coach Ryerson helped me adjust and stay on page with what was going on with varsity and I also talked with Coach Smith on a daily basis. Although this is Division III sports, I have learned that the major schools have some of the same issues that any other school may have, their is just a lot more money involved.
Now, I am not completely done with the JV, one of the issues we have been dealing with is retention in the program. To help with the problem Coach Ryerson added 2 more games at the beginning of the Spring semester. The first game scheduled was Future Academy on January 12, 2008 and the next game Louisburg was scheduled for January 21. We won the game against Future Academy and we have been preparing for Louisburg coming up this MLK day (Monday). I will definitely be posting soon to talk about that one, but right now varsity has another conference game Saturday @ 4 pm against Ferrum College, so we have been focusing on that game but I still have to prepare myself and the JV team for their game on Monday. Stay tuned because the ball is just beginning to bounce and I will return with a lot more exciting things to talk about after this very busy weekend.