Men's Basketball | Jumbos reflect on difficult 1-8 NESCAC season

      When you play in conference, because the teams know each other so well, and because a lot of the coaches are mainstays, you're scouted a lot better and so teams are able to exploit your weaknesses. So in our conference games, opponents were able to exploit our biggest weaknesses, be that our transition defense or inability to keep the dribbler out of the middle our ability to lock into a one-dimensional offense. Whatever it might be for a particular game, teams were able to exploit that.

The one game that I thought we played well and to our potential was the Cal Lutheran game. They were a very good team and we played well as a team, and we played great defense and we got the offensive input we needed from everyone. But that was the last time we played forty minutes of solid basketball.

We're still essentially a young team. We had six juniors, but everyone was sort of playing a new role on the team. We had two of our three freshmen who played significant minutes for us. Other than Aaron and myself, no one was used to playing major minutes at this level and that really hurt us. That really hurt us in game situations because you can't simulate game intensity, unfortunately. That was a big thing. We just didn't play defense, and that's what the season really boils down to. If you don't find ways to get stops against good teams you won't win, regardless of how many scorers you have or how well the offense is playing.

Losing Matt was huge. Matt is a great point guard and will be next year. He's also our only natural point guard. When he went down, the two replacements that filled his shoes, neither one of them had played point guard in high school. So to expect them to step in to a role they had never done before is a lot to ask, and understandably they struggled. So losing Galvin isn't an excuse for how we played, but it had an effect on the offensive side of the ball because it was a lot harder to get into the flow of our offense.

This was a crushing season for me personally and for the team, obviously. Positively, we can look at the fact that we got the year of experience for all of the guys that weren't really expected to contribute before. They were forced into larger roles. We got some playing time out of freshmen that we didn't really expect. In terms of game experience, we gained a lot. And we stuck together as a team, regardless of all the trials that we went through, and the losing and not being able to get over the hump. We're still a great team, we're still great friends. There was never any finger pointing after games when the season was going down the drain.

There's going to be a lot of changes. There has to be. We've won two conference games in two seasons. It's just not acceptable. Coach Sheldon doesn't find that acceptable, the rest of the coaching staff doesn't find it acceptable and I, as a captain, don't find it acceptable. There's going to be a lot of changes in both the things we do on the offensive and defensive side of the ball and just what we expect from people in the off-season. Everyone needs to go into the off-season with a commitment to them selves to get better. Hopefully, everyone's on the same page and I think they will be. The bottom line is that no one likes to lose. No one likes to go through a whole season where you don't play well, so keeping that in mind, that'll be all the motivation I will need as a captain. I can say 'think back on last season and how that made you feel, and what you're going to do to make us better for next year.'








Beyel

We did struggle with some of the little stuff. There was little things, concentration things and mentally we weren't focused for all 40 minutes of NESCAC games.

It felt like every game we played we had a five or ten minute stretch where we just had a complete mental lapse where we wouldn't be guard on our man, we wouldn't be up on the wings, we wouldn't rebound, we wouldn't crash. It just seemed like there were a couple times where we would just zone out and we wouldn't have our intensity. I think those lapses are what killed us because we played even with a team, and go up, and we let them back into it, and go down ten, and then they would beat us by ten.

I don't think there was ever a game where we played to our full potential, but we played pretty well at Cal Lutheran. I think that if we could have kept that up we would have had a much better second half to the season.

For those of us coming back as seniors, it's our last year, so obviously that's a huge motivator. Also, it's good that we have a bunch of guys coming back. This year we didn't have many people used to starting and we had to work on that. Next year we have almost everyone coming back. Now, all the young guys that had to contribute this year will know what it takes to play in league games and play a long season.

Personally, I plan on having a little different approach in terms of conditioning. But teamwise, we're still going to go with the lifting and playing pick-up. There isn't a whole much else we can do. When everyone is going their separate ways in the summer, its hard.