NCDS: Jeremy Shyatt, Asst. Coach - North Florida

By: Jeremy Shyatt, Asst. Coach - North Florida

While road trips can always be an adventure, we recently experienced the grand daddy of them all!!  A 10 day excursion to the upper Midwest and then to Biloxi, Mississippi before Christmas.  Although long, we definitely grew as a family, and finally began to enjoy the fruits of our labor with a Championship in the Southern Mississippi Christmas Classic.

After dropping contests to Northwestern and Marquette, we took our #5 national strength of schedule down to Mississippi for 3 games in 3 days against Canisius, New Orleans, and the host, Southern Miss.  All proved to be great tests for our young basketball team, and during this 72 hours, our kids finally began to understand the little things that are needed in order to win a championship.

From the time our staff has gotten to Jacksonville, we wanted to instill a culture in the heads of our team that we are going to play for championships every season.  In order to do this, they needed to believe in the system and begin to embrace an identity-that defense will lead us to a championship.

When you are going up against stiff competition early, along the lines of Notre Dame, Illinois State, Alabama, Northwestern and Marquettes, it can be easy for young kids to lose focus as losses on the road can pile up.  But our guys had an unbelievable resiliency and heading into this Christmas Classic they knew this was our opportunity to do what we had talked about since August-win a championship.

With three games in three days it provided our guys a chance to get a feel for tournament style play with minimal time to prepare for each game as only 24 hrs separated each game.  Again, everything we try to do is to prepare them for March, and in the A-Sun Tournament, it will be no different.

Our championship victory against Southern Miss was the culmination of our hard work as our identity was truly on display. Holding Southern Miss to twenty-five percent shooting during the game and to only thirteen first half points was something our guys could hang their hats on. The win was an entire team effort as we played a solid forty minutes of basketball. Attaining one of our goals was great to see and it was even greater to see our players cutting the nets down in the Southern Miss Christmas Classic to end a great 10 days of basketball!!

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