I'll Be a Son of a Shark

[CoachC]

ooc: Damn! forgot to finalize the schedule before moving on. The AD didn't do TOO bad a job scheduling us on his own though, although we have a few too many soft home games, and amazingly he put Liberty and GARDNER-WEBB(!) both on our schedule.

[CoachC]

Oct 2: Practice begins this week. Fortunately the players here are already well versed with Man and 1-3-1 which makes our work a bit easier. None of the offensive sets from the previous regime really suits our needs though, so we'll be starting over from scratch there, along with teaching the Amoeba, so there is still a ton to learn before play begins. We don't have a tremendous amount of outside shooters here so we'll abandon the 5 out we used at GW and work on Princeton and Triangle both of which shall work well with the guys we have coming in next year as well. For this season at least we'll probably play a fair amount of motion as well even though I'm not a big fan, but it's the set they are most familiar with until they get further along with the new sets.

[CoachC]

Oct 3: A couple guys still struggling a bit in school so we'll continue to get them tutoring.

[CoachC]

Oct 5. We are being picked 2nd in the Mountain west behind final four team Air Force and just ahead of UNLV. There has been a lot of talk in the Vegas papers about us using the Amoeba Zone and they aren't real thrilled about it. Keep saying we are tarnishing the memory of what Tarkanian did there. I'm a bit surprised we are being picked so highly in the conference regardless, since this team finished 15-17 last year and missed the post-season. Our administration has made it clear to us that they want to get this program back to the big dance after a number of largely mediocre years under the previous coaching staff. We'd like that too, of course, but it might be a tall order for this year, while teaching a new system. We do have a few guys that can play though, so we will be hoping for the best.

[CoachC]

Oct 30: Practice has generally been going smoothly but jr forward John Willis has been causing some drama in practice this week I've had to deal with. Hopefully there will be no further incidents.

Jr. guard Fernando Martin is still struggling some in school so we'll keep getting him some help. He's probably this teams best perimeter threat and we can't afford to have him becoming ineligible.

[CoachC]

Nov 4. We've had a few more minor incidents in practice this week but nothing too serious.

[CoachC]

ooc: dammit have been practicing the wrong pressure set. That'll set us back quite a bit.

[Wayne23]

Yeesh, forgot to do the sched? Tweaking the sched is one of my favs. Two demerits.

And two more for practicing the wrong press. Humph. No COY for YOU this year.

JK, I've done both, maybe not in the same year though...

Congrats on the recruits. Great job there!

[PointGuard]

Yeesh, forgot to do the sched? Tweaking the sched is one of my favs. Two demerits.

And two more for practicing the wrong press. Humph. No COY for YOU this year.

Welllll...before taking the NM job he WAS thinking of retiring. LOL

[CoachC]

Nov 4: Our first exhibition against Winston Salem St. Obviously I'll have a lot to assess in these exhibitions.

After playing in some of the barns in the Big South, coming into The Pit with it's huge capacity of 18,000 + feels reallly strange. Of course for the exhibition most of those seats sit empty, and season ticket sales are down for the 3rd year in a row, thanks to recent mediocrity and a losing campaign last year. I'm confident we'll be able to turn that around eventually, as the Lobos have a loyal following. It'd be great fun to get THIS place filled to the rafters, let me tell you! Having played here with the Aggies, and having worked as a graduate assistant after I had the experience coming here 2 or 3 times in the annual showdown between UNM and NM St. and let me tell you it could be pretty intimidating being on the opposing side, because those games always had huge crowds.

There a couple of very positive things we were able to see in this game. One is that we looked pretty confident and fluid on offense no matter who was in the game. Secondly, although we will be playing very little Amoeba Zone this season because of the high learning curve and only sparingly at best early in the season, we still managed to 25 times on 12 steals which was pretty impressive. We also have a lot of depth at the point and our 15 to 10 a/to ratio was very satisfactory.

On the negative side, we need a lot of work in our man to man defense, and we appear to be rather thin at the 3, meaning we'll probably be playing a 3 guard offense much of the time.

Worst of all though was our rebounding which was atrocious. 16-36, 7-12 are numbers we certainly can not live with.

Individually, Fernando Martin is most likely going to be our go to guy on offense and impressed to night with 12 points in 14 minutes. Nobody on the team rebounded well, however, and that's a big concern.

we win the game 61-59