Sunday, February 28, 2010

In Case You Were Wondering (About Harris)

Freshman C.J. Harris played 14 minutes yesterday against North Carolina. Coming in, he was averaging 28.2.

Harris took three shots (two from 3-point range) and missed them all. For the second game in a row, he didn’t score.

Over the last five games, Harris has shot 15 percent from the floor (five for 33) and 12 percent from 3-point range (two for 17) while averaging 3.6 points. Before the slide, he was averaging 11.2.

So I asked Coach Dino Gaudio what was going on with C.J. Harris.

“I just think C.J. is a terrific kid who, like a few in that locker room, has just lost his confidence a little bit,’’ Gaudio said. “We sat down with him and put a C.J. Harris clip together where he was playing really well. At Gonzaga. He shot the ball really well against Purdue. We had all those shots he made just to say `Hey C.J., you’ve done it. Here look,’ just to try to make him a little bit of a pick-me-up-tape, if you will.’‘

In Case You Were Wondering (About Woods)

Sophomore Tony Woods made his eighth start of the season, and his first since Dec, 13, against North Carolina yesterday, in place of senior Chas McFarland.

Woods scored four of the Deacons’ first six points, but was on the bench well before the first media timeout, the first Wake player to be substituted for. He played 10 minutes in the first half, hitting three of four shots from the floor for eight points to go with four rebounds.

McFarland started the second half, and Woods never returned to the game until the second media timeout at 11:38. John Henson of the Tar Heels dunked on an inbounds play and at the other end, Woods began a drive from the top of the key, took a dribble or two and threw the ball away. Moments later the horn blew and McFarland replaced Woods. So Woods, done for the day, played a total of one minute in the second half.

I asked Coach Dino Gaudio about the decision to start Woods.

“I just thought Tony was practicing better, nothing outside of that,’’ Gaudio said. “I just thought he was practicing better so we put him in there.’‘

And I asked Gaudio why Woods played only one minute in the second half.

“The only reason he didn’t play in the second half, I just didn’t think he was playing well,’’ Gaudio said. “I didn’t. I didn’t think he was playing well. I think early in the game their post guys were hurting us. They were hurting us with second shots.

“But those were just coaching decisions off players’ performances, nothing else.’‘

It’s not an original thought to say that coaches are much quicker to take into account defensive performance, while most fans (and sportswriters) put much more stock in what happens at the offensive end. The Tar Heels did score their first two field goals on follow shots, and when Deon Thompson scored over Woods, Woods was on his way to the bench.

But the performance did bring to mind last year’s NCAA Tournament, when Woods made a surprise start and played a total of five minutes in the 84-69 loss to Cleveland State. The difference is, last year the season was over and Woods had to wait seven months to make amends. This year he only has to wait four days before the Deacons’ game at Florida State on Wednesday.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Williams Calls for Crazed Dog Mentality

Throughout the second half of Wake Forest’s 77-68 loss to North Carolina, a quote from Coach Dino Gaudio of the Deacons kept bouncing around in my head.

Gaudio had observed a couple of weeks ago that coach-driven teams go only so far. It’s the player-driven teams that advance deep in the NCAA Tournament. I found it rather profound, and built a blog around it.

So that’s what has been so surprising about the Deacons’ three-game slide that picked up steam with today’s loss to a wounded arch-rival at home on national television. I really thought that the senior leadership of Ish Smith and L.D. Williams would provide the steel and inner strength a team needs to win tough games in late March and February. In today’s game, Smith had seven assists and only one turnover, but he made just five of 21 shots from the floor. And Williams had nine rebounds and 14 points, but was just three for 13 from the floor.

Williams said that the losing streak is on the team as a whole, but he and the other seniors know they have to carry more than their share of the weight.

“If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that, that it’s up to us seniors to get the guys going, I probably wouldn’t bank on this college degree,’’ Williams said. “But everybody’s right. It’s up to us. We’ve been through the trenches year in and year out. We’re the guys that everybody looks to. If something goes wrong, they look to us. You’ve got to be the guys to fix it. Obviously we’re not doing our job.’‘

And I’ve been either warned or forewarned (maybe someone can explain the difference) that the next practice I can attend might get a bit heated.

“I’m pretty sure you’re going to see a change in Ishmael Smith and you’re definitely going to see a change in L.D. Williams,’’
Williams said. “I told the guys in the locker room, it feels like Groundhogs Day. We wake up on the game day, we go to sleep and the next game we say the same things over and over – `Rebound, defense and execute on offense.’ That’s what we’ve been saying the last three games, and we haven’t been doing it.

“It’s enough being nice. It’s enough saying some guys have got it. We’ve got to go to the crazed dog mentality right now, because our back is against the wall now. That’s where it’s at. We’ve got to find ourselves again. If it takes us having to go back to square one, that’s what it’s going to take. If it takes the coach sitting some guys, that’s what it’s going to take. But we’ve got to understand what it means to wear the Wake Forest Old Gold and Black again. We’ve kind of gotten away from that.’‘

Williams also fired a salvo at those who have already written the Deacons off this season.

“People can say what they want,’’ Williams said. “They’re not in our locker room. They’re not out on the floor with us playing.

“There are a lot of naysayers. Those are the people that we have to weed out. We’re going to walk on campus on Monday with our heads held high, ready to get better. That’s the only thing we can do from here, get better. So all the people out there who want to nag us and count us out, that’s all right. That’s all well and fine. If we’re doing well, we don’t want you on the bandwagon.’’

Media Blackout for Black and Gold

I have it on good authority that none of the Wake Forest players are going to be reading this blog after today’s 77-68 loss to North Carolina in Joel Coliseum. Or at least they’ve been ordered not to by head coach Dino Gaudio, who also dictated that they not watch the highlights on television or peruse the message boards.

That was the message Gaudio had for his team after the stunning loss, and that’s what he told the assembled media after what was probably—given the opponent, the losing streak, and the the week off to prepare to play at home on national television—the toughest loss the Deacons have had to swallow all season.

It’s been often said a team looks good when it shoots well and looks bad when it shoots poorly. The Deacons missed 52 shots and looked terrible. (They were 22 of 74, the exact totals of last March’s first-round loss to Maryland in the ACC Tournament). They also looked like a team that will have to turn it around fast to avoid undoing all accomplished over the first 3 1/2 months on the way to an 18-5 overall record with a 8-3 conference record.

Now they’re 18-8 and 8-6 with one foot in Thursday’s first-round of the ACC Tournament and the other sliding ever close to the NCAA Tournament bubble.

“I told the kids, `Turn the TVs off,’ Gaudio said. “(I said) `Turn the boards off, turn the television off, with `Are you in, or out you out?’ None of that stuff matters right now. All we have to worry about is trying to get better. We have to worry about us. Don’t worry what this person is saying, `ACC Tournament, NCAA Tournament.’ That’s the last thing we need to worry about right now.’

“We’ll just worry about trying to get better and trying to get a win right now. That’s the only thing that matters right now. It’s not, `Are we in, are out, are we on the bubble, are we off the bubble, do we have a bye, do we not have a bye?’ We’ve just got to play. Those things are so much on the periphery of what we need to concentrate on.’

Senior L.D. Williams echoed the sentiment, when asked what he can expect after the final two regular season games against Florida State in Tallahassee on Wednesday and Clemson at home on Sunday.

“We’ll see after those two games,’’ Williams said. “Those two games will define a lot of what we want to do. We can’t be worried about what Joe Lundardi is going to say about us tonight. We can’t be worried about what the committee is going to say about us tonight. We can’t worry about that. The only thing we can worry about is what we’re going to do to fix the problem against Florida State on Wednesday.’‘

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Aminu Growing In Leaps and Bounds

One reference site I checked attributed to Al McGuire the quote ``The best thing about freshmen is that they become sophomores.’’ I’m sure Al said it, but I really doubt he was the first. I know for certain he wasn’t the last.

Along about this time last season we were all wondering if Al-Farouq Aminu would even become a sophomore at Wake Forest, or would he take his immense talents to the NBA. I’m glad the returned, for the sake of the Deacons, for him, and for me.

Aminu, who leads the ACC in both rebounding and offensive rebounding, has clearly taken advantage of the year to improve his game, and that, in turn, has made Wake a much better team. And personally I’ve profitted because I’ve really enjoyed getting to know Farouq even better. I was impressed with him last season, but he is clearly a different kid now, wiser, more mature and more comfortable in his own skin. His personality, surprisingly madcap for someone who carries such a serious demeanor, is really coming out. Ish Smith said the two are always cracking each other up.

“He’s a trip,’’ Smith said. “Farouq’s a trip. He’s been like that since his freshman year too.

“Actually we got the impression (that he was quiet and serious) when he came on his visit. His mom came up and hugged me and I met (older brother) Alade through playing against him, and his little brother (Wajid) is hilarious, always joking, having a ball. I remember him being quiet, and kind of looking around. But as soon as he got comfortable with us, we were like `Who is this dude?’ And I have a ball with him. We joke around all the time.’‘

Farouq recognizes that he has grown in many ways since arriving at Wake, which is what any college student should expect.

“I think that’s just growing up,’’ Aminu said. “Now I kind of like know who I am. I think out of high school, I thought I knew who I was. I don’t want to say I was trying to be somebody else, but it was like I wasn’t 100 percent sure about myself. I think it’s kind of hard to be out of high school. But now I know myself straight up and down and I know what I will do and I know what I wanted do. Now I’m comfortable so I don’t worry about how somebody might judge me because I know who I am.’‘

We’re running a piece on Aminu in tomorrow’s Journal which will address his future after this season. There are no bombshells in the story, so don’t lose any sleep in anticipation. He hasn’t ruled out returning for a junior year, but I haven’t really talked to anyone who expects him to be able to turn down the kind of money he can command two years in a row. But Coach Dino Gaudio said the best thing is that the question of whether Aminu will stay or go hasn’t been an issue for the team one way or another.

I hope you check it out. Selfishly I’d love to see him back next year, but my take is we should just appreciate him—as a player and a person—as long as he is here.

“He’s a heck of a player and we’ll be watching him awhile on TV,’’ Smith said.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

C.J., Ari Find Bead on Basket

There was really no need for me to hang at Wake’s practice for long yesterday. It took only a couple of minutes to see what I had come to Joel Coliseum to see.

C.J. Harris took a 3-pointer and it swished. Ari Stewart took a 3-pointer and it swished. I’m willing to sign an affidavit to that in front of a notary.

Actually both shot well yesterday, and unless I miss my guess, they’ll shoot well Saturday against North Carolina. Being back at home should have a calming, restorative effect on the whole team, especially the freshmen. Both are upbeat personalities and both seemed unfazed by their recent struggles. They’ve been two really good additions to the team, for their positive energy as much as their obvious abilities.

As it turned out, I did stay for most of practice, which was spirited and crisp, as most of them are. Coach Dino Gaudio came over while he turned the 15-minute stretching segment at the start of practice over to the team trainer non parallel, Greg Collins, and we talked about his team. He said the Deacons went twice on Monday, once at 7 a.m. and again around 1, and of course they were going through their paces yesterday. They’ll take today off, and then set their sights on the Tar Heels during practices on Thursday and Friday.

Dino said he was taking advantage of the break to talk individually with everyone on the team, just to check in with them and see what’s on their minds. He said it’s something he likes to do a few times a season. He asked everyone about the atmosphere in the locker room these days and reported that, to a man, the Deacons said it’s a close-knit team that gets along really well. I’m not in the locker room myself, so I can’t vouch, but I can say I’ve seen no signs whatsoever during practices of a team pulling apart.

Of course there’s nothing that can bond a team together like winning, and as L.D. Williams said after Saturday’s loss at N.C. State the Deacons don’t need a late-season collapse that would undo all they’ve done up to this point. All ACC games are big. There are only 16 of them. But this one Saturday will be one of the biggest.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Surviving Tar Pits and Telecopiers

Back when I took up sportswriting, the challenge of transmitting my story from the road back to the office could be a far greater pain in the behind than writing the story in the first place. And no, I didn’t ever use carrier pigeon or pony express, despite what you might suspect from the gray in my beard.

But I did use telecopiers, and somehow lived to tell about it. Telecopiers were these large, bulky machines that linked up with each other, allowing the written word to be transmitted through phone lines. That’s when they worked, which was about a 50-50 proposition. We’d type our stories on typing paper, which would be inserted into a spool that rotated through a chemical solution that stunk to high heavens. At the other end, the receiving telecopier required special paper—nasty stuff that got the chemical substance all over your hands and clothes. And it took forever. The settings were for 4 or 6 minutes per page, and we were told to always send it on 6 because 4 rarely got through. Truth be told, 6 didn’t make it through that often, which required plan B.

Plan B was to pick up a phone, dial the office and dictate the story word for word to some unlucky soul at the other end.

Early computers really weren’t that much better. The first wave were also heavy and bulky and had a screen about the size of a slice of bread, and the phone had to be inserted in couplers. If the crowd roared before you could get the phone in the couplers, the noise would trigger the transmission prematurely and cause you to stop, reset everything and start all over again. The second wave, the Radio Shack TRS-80s (Trash 80s in sportswriter parlance) were reliable little buggers, but they gave you only four or five lines to a screen and the capacity was so limited that when you were writing a long story, you had to print out the notes and quotes you had transcribed, and delete the file to have enough bytes available to write the piece itself.

It was a happy day when we graduated to laptops. Even then, however, we had to dial up the modem back at the office, and the phone systems in many of the arenas and gyms we found ourselves weren’t always reliable. So again we had to resort to Plan B from time to time.

The greatest innovation in my time as sportswriter, in terms of saving me time, sweat and aggravation, was wireless. With wireless you’re solid gold. A click of a button and you’re connected to the company email. I remember covering the Orange Bowl of 2006 and having to send at least a half-dozen transmissions over the six or seven hours we were at the stadium. If I had been forced to jump through hoops every time, I would have been led out of the press box in a strait jacket. And my copy would have never made it back by deadline.

What set me off on this tangent was my new favorite song by one of my old favorite singer/songwriters, Robert Earl Keen. He’s asking the same question I’ll be asking if I’m lucky enough to make it through the Pearly Gates. Is There Wireless in Heaven?

Monday, February 22, 2010

It’s Time for Leaders to Lead

The great fear that’s spooked the Wake Forest fan base over the past week is that the Deacons hit the high-water mark of their season with 12 1/2 minutes remaining in last Tuesday’s game at Virginia Tech.

The Deacons, as I’m sure you recall, led the Hokies by 11 at that point and appeared rolling toward their fifth straight victory. That was until Virginia Tech scored 37 points over its final 26 possessions to win going away. Instead of learning from the experience, the Deacons stumbled into Raleigh, committed 15 first-half turnovers against an N.C. State team that applies little defensive pressure and ended up getting waxed by 14 by the last-place team in the ACC.

Given Wake Forest’s recent proclivity for turning the promise of January into the pain of March, it’s inevitable that the Deacons’ two-game slide has raised the specter of another late collapse. And maybe that’s what is indeed in store for the remaining three games of the regular season leading into tournament play.

But Coach Dino Gaudio mentioned something a week or so ago that might provide a bit of hope for those among the faithful ever prepared to again assume the fetal position. He was talking about the makeup of teams, and how a coach-driven team can sustain its momentum for only so long. It’s the player-driven teams, he said, that usually advance deep into March.

All season Gaudio has raved about the leadership on this team, provided mostly by seniors Ish Smith and L.D. Williams. Time and again he has described moments when the players themselves took the floor during team meetings and how much more of an impact that can have. But the leadership has not been confined to Smith and Williams. He recalled sophomore Al-Farouq Aminu recently pulling freshman Ari Stewart aside after a scouting report had been given to the team and warning Stewart what to expect from a certain opponent that Aminu played against last season.

Many of you have observed that this team is probably not as talented as last year’s team, but that it appears to have better chemistry. I agree, even after the debacle in Raleigh. Jeff Teague and James Johnson were obviously skillful athletes, or else they wouldn’t have been drafted among the top 19 players in last summer’s NBA draft. But Teague is introverted by nature and Johnson has a flippant personality that is hard to read. Neither were the natural leaders that Smith and Williams appear to be.

Not to absolve Gaudio of any responsibility, but it’s mostly up to Smith and Williams and the rest of the veterans to assert their leadership and ownership of the team over this next week and have everybody ready to play North Carolina in Joel Coliseum Saturday.

Otherwise, the makeup of the team might be different but the final results could be the same.

If You’re Checking in Riley, Check This Out

One day during football season I asked Riley Skinner if he had ever heard of Gram Parsons, the visionary singer/songwriter from the 1960s and early 70s who graduated from Bolles School in Jacksonville, the same school Skinner and many members of his family attended. I really didn’t expect Riley know know of Parsons, a tortured soul who died in 1973 at the tender age of 26. By way of explanation, I mentioned that it was Parsons who had “discovered’’ Emmylou Harris singing in a club in Washington, D.C. and had helped catapult her to fame.

When Riley, a self-professed fan of country music, said he had never heard of Emmylou Harris, I was surprised. Stan Cotten, the voice of the Deacons, and I chided Riley a bit, and said he should check Emmylou out. A couple of you guys in the Peanut Gallery wrote in to mention that Riley should be excused for this particular gap in his musical knowledge, given that he wasn’t even born until 1986, and I agreed that you were right.

I was reminded of our exchange a couple of days ago when a long-time pal, Billy Armour, sent me a link to a performance by Emmylou Harris and Ryan Adams of what is probably my favorite Gram Parsons song of all time, Return of the Grievous Angel. So to Riley Skinner and anyone else who doesn’t know Emmylou Harris, this is why you should. Return of the Grievous Angel

As a side note, I never really got Ryan Adams before. Now I do.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Wake Comes up Empty During and After Loss

Coach Dino Gaudio and I had something in common along about 4:30 this afternoon. I wanted to know why his Deacons came out the dreadful way they came out in the first half against N.C. State.

And so did he.

“I don’t know,’’ Gaudio said. “I wish I had the answer to that. I really do. I wish I had the answer to that.

“We were off on Wednesday. I thought we had a really good practice on Thursday. We talked a lot about these seniors wanting to win here.

“I thought mentally we were ready to play. There was a lot to play for. In this series, our seniors before today were 4-4 with these guys. There was so very much to play for. I wish I could put my finger on why we came out the way we did.’‘

I posed the same question to L.D. Williams, C.J. Harris, Al-Farouq Aminu and Ish Smith, and none them had a clue. Or if they did, they weren’t telling.

If you think I was pushing the point a bit hard, you obviously didn’t see the game. The Deacons were as bad offensively in the first half as I’ve seen them since the first half of last March’s disastrous loss to Cleveland State in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. They had 36 possesions in the half, which they spent committing 15 turnovers, missing 20 of 27 shots from the floor and four of eight free throws.

And they were playing the last-place team in the ACC, one that had lost five straight games.

“I don’t know if there’s any explanation for it,’’ Aminu said. “That’s a poor job on us. We’ve got to make sure we’re mentally ready for the game. We have to improve on that.’‘