December 14, 2011

Diary Series: J.D. Byers, Asst. Coach - Radford

December has arrived on the calendar and the Radford Highlanders have already played 11 games! It has been a crazy stretch for our team since we opened the 2011-12 season on November 11^th.  The season started with a schedule featuring seven games in the first 13 days, including playing back-to-back games on two different occasions.  Trips to Penn State, the University of Kentucky and to the Mohegan Sun Arena in CT for the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame Tipoff were all part of the early schedule.

This stretch was an unbelievable challenge for our team.  As featured in my last post, we are a new staff here at Radford University, led by Head Coach Mike Jones.  We have a roster full of young and relatively inexperienced players.  Every minute we have for practice, film, weight lifting or team meetings is so valuable at this stage of the development of our program.  The players are working with a new coaching staff.  Our upperclassmen are taking on roles they have never experienced before. Our freshmen are adjusting to life as a college student-athlete.  And they all are learning to work together to accomplish a common goal.  Not to mention, the daily academic requirements they must handle.

When you have a schedule that features that many games in such a short amount of time, you are forced to spend a lot of time preparing for the next opponent.  Scouting reports, on court scouting and film are all part of that process.  The time needed to focus on the opponent takes away time that you would usually spend focusing on the needs of your team.  In addition, your players are getting limited recovery time from game to game.  This can often lead to teams falling into bad habits that must be corrected moving forward.

This is an issue we talked about extensively as a staff here at Radford leading up to the start of the season.  As a new staff, we have been asked countless times what our goal is for the season.  When fans/supporters/critics ask that question, they are looking for you to pinpoint a win total for the year.  In our program, we have one main goal that we talk about all of the time.  Our goal is to improve as a basketball team every day.  Whether its having a productive study hall session, individual workout, film session or a practice/game, we want to walk out a better basketball team then we were prior to the start of that job.

Keeping that goal in mind, Coach Jones wanted to make sure we spent time focusing on our team every day.  Practice plans featured time that was devoted solely to the needs of our basketball team.  Short drills or game-like segments were used to emphasize areas that needed improvement.  Film breakdown from the previous game or practice was also used to help reinforce what we were trying to accomplish.  This approach allowed our team to continue to improve despite the hectic game schedule.

Once this stretch concluded, we had about a week to prepare for our first two league games of the year (both on the road) against Charleston Southern University and Presbyterian College.  That week of practice featured some of our most intense and productive practices of the year.  We were able to cleanup some of the areas of concern coming out of the first two weeks of the season and begin to move forward with certain offensive and defensive packages that we had not had time to implement to this point. 

I think our team was able to learn a lot about itself from this early season challenge. As we all know, every team goes through some type of adversity during the course of a college basketball season.   We were forced to face adversity right from the start.  I’ve often been told that, “adversity reveals character.”  We are learning a lot about the character of our team right now.

Wishing everyone a safe and happy holiday.  See you in the New Year!

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