Wednesday vs. PBA: LIVE STREAMING | LIVE STATS
Friday vs. Rollins: LIVE STREAMING | LIVE STATS
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – The Nova Southeastern University men's basketball team returns to the friendly confines of the NSU Arena for their first home game in two weeks, playing host to Palm Beach Atlantic Wednesday night, before turning right back around two days later to face Rollins on Friday, also at home.
The Sharks (2-3, 1-1 SSC) are looking to even up their 2015-16 record and expand on their two wins on their home floor during the opening week. First, it will be NSU against Sunshine State Conference provisional member PBA (3-3), Wednesday at 7:30, then the Sharks will be back in the NSU Arena Friday evening at 5:30, taking on conference opponent Rollins (7-0, 1-0 SSC), who is undefeated on the early season.
After returning home from Texas, NSUSharks.com discussed the trip with men's head coach
Gary Tuell in preparation for the next two home games.
Q: Your team had a grueling trip to Texas over Thanksgiving. Tell us about it. GT: "We left campus at 6:45 am on Thanksgiving morning, flew to Dallas, had a very good practice at the University of North Texas arena and drove two hours to Wichita Falls, Texas, where we enjoyed a team Thanksgiving dinner. When we left Wichita Falls for what we expected to be a three-and-a-half hour drive to Amarillo, Texas, the problems began. We drove through rain, freezing rain, ice and snow. We drove on a highway that experienced over 100 accidents. Thankfully, we weren't involved in any incidents, but the travel conditions were so bad that it took us about seven hours to arrive in Amarillo. We thought about pulling over, for safety reasons, but I knew if we did that we would be stuck on the side of a highway for the rest of the night and maybe a good part of the next day. The weather was not going to get better, it was only going to get worse, so stopping meant possibly not even arriving to play in the tournament at West Texas A&M. It wasn't going to do anything to help us, so we braved the ice and snow and drove with great caution. We kept moving forward. We got to the hotel around 2 a.m. The entire day took us about 20 hours from start to finish, and the last seven hours were really stressful. We skipped our shootaround on Friday morning so the guys could sleep in. Of our 15 players, probably a dozen were battling colds and flu symptoms, as were the coaches.
"We played West Texas A&M Friday night and five minutes into the game
Nick Pendergast (Sr., Bridgewater, Conn.), who has been terrific for us, went down, for the rest of that game and the game on Saturday.
Chris Page (Sr., Plainfield, Ind.) was really sick and we didn't play him in the second half of Friday's game. On Saturday he gave us all he could, but his night ended prematurely when he became too ill to go on.
Casey Carroll (R-Jr., Youngstown, Ohio) played well Friday but tweaked his back on Saturday and we lost him early in that game.
Harrison Goodrick (Jr., Sydney, Australia) had foul problems both nights and played about nine minutes on Friday and 10 minutes on Saturday. Without Nick, Chris, Casey and Harrison we were not the team we needed to be to win games, but this trip was mostly about survival and while we lost two games, we made it home in one piece … sick and tired and banged up … but at least we made it home safely. And a lot of young guys got an opportunity to play two tough road games, which was helpful for the future. Our guys play and practice in Fort Lauderdale, where the elevation is 13 feet. The elevation at Amarillo is 3,600 feet, and that took a toll on us in ways only an athlete could probably understand. It was very difficult. We weren't happy with much of anything after Friday night's game and after five hours of watching that game film our guys came together and gave great effort on Saturday. Unfortunately, our execution didn't match the effort, and playing with four key guys either out or battling illness made it that much more challenging. It was a very rough trip, maybe the roughest I've been involved in over my long coaching career. West Texas A&M was a very good team and Eastern New Mexico played well in spots against us, so we don't want to take anything away from those guys. But for us, the trip became more about survival than winning."
Q: Were there any positives that you can take away from the two losses in Texas? GT: "We made it home safe and sound, so that's a positive. When you're stuck in a hotel and the temperature is in the teens and the sidewalks, parking lots and roads are covered in ice and snow, there isn't much to do, so we had a very productive five-hour film session on Friday night and Saturday morning that helped clear some things up for guys and I think helped bring our team closer together. We had a chance to play in a beautiful arena at West Texas and our guys enjoyed that. As coaches we have a better understanding of changes that we need to make to help this team down the road. You always learn more from games than you do from practices and we learned some things about ourselves. Despite all the challenges we faced on this trip, and they were too numerous to name, I was very pleased with how hard we played Saturday night and how much pride the guys took in their effort. The guys got closer. And two of our walk-ons,
Jonathan Back (Jr., Carlisle, Ohio) and
Remi Farrell (Jr., Woodbridge, Conn.), did a really nice job for us Saturday night. They showed that they can help us. Dwayne Gibson (Indianapolis, Ind.), a freshman, continues to improve. We have a lot of work to do with Dwayne over the next couple of years to improve some of the flaws in his game, but his effort and attitude continue to impress all of us. I have a better feel for what some of the guys are able to do and eventually we'll get where we want to be. It's going to take time. We're working with a lot of young and new players and while we all want to see positive results right away because that's the nature of the world we live in today, the reality is that to do the things we want to do, it's going to take time and patience. I think that reality hit the coaching staff square in the face this past weekend. "
Q: Will the adversity from the Texas trip have an impact on your two homes games this week? If anything, it's nice to be playing at home again, right? GT: "It is wonderful to be at home, and a trip like the one we just took helps all of us appreciate what we have and where we are and how blessed we are to be living and working and going to school in The Fort. We had to give the players Monday off; anything other than that would have been cruel. We just have too many guys who are sick right now, or who are nursing some injuries, and as much as we need to be in practice so we can begin fixing some things that need repair, we needed to rest and recover as much as possible more than we needed to be on the practice court. That leaves us one day, Tuesday, to prepare for a very tough Palm Beach Atlantic team on Wednesday. And we have a quick turnaround with Rollins coming in on Friday, so again we will only have one day to prepare for that game. What this team really needs right now is four or five good days of practice but the schedule doesn't give us that. We don't have time to make the changes that we need to make, so we'll have to take the things we're doing and play with that package on Wednesday and Friday. I know we're not going to be healthy or at full strength for either of those games, and I know there are things we need to fix that can't get fixed with one day of practice. As coaches, we have to live with that. It's frustrating, but there's no alternative. All we can ask from the guys is that they give their best possible effort under the circumstances and hope that effort and attitude will be enough to get us through this week. Once we get past these two games, we can start making the corrections and fixes that we need. Until then, we just have to hope we play hard enough and play tough enough that we can give ourselves a chance to win.
Q: With five games under your belt, you have some concrete results to use in evaluating both your team and your individual players. Can you update us on your thought about the team as well as your thoughts on some of the players? GT: "We're 2-0 at home and 0-3 on the road, so obviously we play better at home than away from home. That's typical of young teams, and with four freshmen and a sophomore transfer, I'm not surprised by that. It's a little more difficult to evaluate than maybe it should be because of the conditions and circumstances of our road trip to Texas. It's not like we were healthy and playing with all our pieces and putting the team on the floor that we wanted or hoped to have out there in games on Friday and Saturday. We were constantly patching up the lineup, playing some very unusual groups together because circumstances dictated it, and we weren't able to work on some of the things we were looking forward to working on because we never had the players we needed available to us. We wanted to use the weekend to work on some things with a big lineup but after Nick went down, and Chris was sick, and Casey was hobbled, and Harry wasn't able to play due to fouls, we had to play completely opposite of the way we wanted and completely different than how we had practiced. It was frustrating for the coaches and players. We're going to be a good team and we're going to find the right way for this team to play. But the freshmen remind me every day, in practice and games, of just how young they are and just how little they know about competing successfully at this level. But they're learning. The older guys have probably had some frustration over the way we've played 15 guys in every game until Saturday, and even then we used 12 or 13 players. I think the older guys are looking forward to the coaches settling on lineups and playing time so they can begin to get into a rhythm and so they can develop more cohesiveness. I understand that, I get that. But for us to be good in February we have to take some time now to get our younger guys some experience and to let them see themselves on film so they can see the mistakes they're making and the areas where they need to improve.
"We are definitely not shooting the ball as well as we thought we would. At the beginning of the year we thought we had a much better shooting team than we had last year, but so far the game results haven't proven that to be true. If anything, the game results of been the complete opposite of what we expected. Some of that is the inconsistency of our players, especially the younger ones, in executing our offense. Some of that is guys forcing bad shots because the offense has broken down. When young players break down the offense because they're unsure what to do or because of mental mistakes, that puts pressure on others to try and bail them out and often our bailout option is a bad or rushed shot. Defensively, we haven't been the best. We have possessions where two or three or sometimes four guys do all the right things but there's almost always one or two guys who are completely out of position or forget their responsibilities and their mistake negates the good stuff other guys are doing. It's not always the young players, either, it's both the young and old guys who are breaking down too often. Our ball pressure is not good enough, our rotations are not good, our contesting shots by opponents is not good, our reaction time is very poor. We have a lot of work to do at both ends of the floor, but we'll get there. We'll get it all sorted out eventually. The guys are willing, they have great attitudes and I think they are much closer to understanding than perhaps the results indicate. As for individuals, I don't know. They all have some wonderful moments and all do some good things, but they all have a long way to go in different areas. They don't have big egos and they're all willing. They're easy to coach and they listen, for the most part, to what their coaches tell them. I think, to a man, all of these guys have the team at heart and want to see the team do well, and that's one of the reasons I'm confident we'll get where we want to be. It just takes time.
Q: What can we expect from Wednesday night's game against Palm Beach Atlantic, and looking ahead to Friday night, can you give us some insight into Rollins and their fast start? GT: "Palm Beach Atlantic will be disciplined, they will have us scouted as well as anyone we play, they will do a great job of defending us and taking some things away from us, and they'll have a good plan for attacking us. That's just the way any team coached by Dave Balza will play. We have to make some shots, something we haven't been doing, and we have to be much more aggressive and active defensively. I don't know yet who will be sick and who will be well enough to play. We just have to wait and see at game time how guys are feeling. Rollins is off to a terrific start. They are a team that seems to be playing with a mission. Tom Klusman is a terrific coach and they're going to be highly efficient offensively and throw a few zone defenses at us that we haven't seen. You have to make shots to beat Rollins, and you have to be able to get the ball inside with some success, and right now we haven't been good in either of those areas. Because we zone, Rollins will get a lot of perimeter looks and that is not good for us because Rollins has a great shooting club and we have not been very good at defending perimeter shooters. They're the first team we've faced this year that plays zone defense exclusively, and the first time you play against a zone you usually struggle because you have to attack them differently than you do other teams and the shots you get are not the same as you get in your man offense. The only way we can hope to have success against either PBA or Rollins is to play with great effort, great energy, and keep moving forward when things aren't going well. As I said earlier, what our team needs right now is a good week of practice to work on our areas of weakness and to fix some of the things we definitely need to correct. I wish we had that time, but we don't. I wish we had a full squad of healthy players for these two games, but we don't. So let's see if some young guys will step up and let's see if we can bounce back from adversity. Let's find out if we can play hard enough and play together well enough to overcome some of the obstacles in front of us. Every game is an obstacle and every game is an opportunity. Let's see if we can find our way around the obstacles and embrace the opportunities."
