The High Point of the Early Season
Thanks High Point.
I imagine Wake Forest needed the kind of first-half performance you gave last night at Joel Coliseum. I know I certainly did. Two games (to use the term loosely) into the season and I was already getting bored with games that were pretty much decided the day the teams signed the contract to play. This is not a knock on Coach Gaudio’s scheduling. The Deacons will have their share of non-conference tests, and any team that plays Purdue and Gonzaga on the road and Xavier at home has nothing to apologize for. But still I was more than ready last night to see how they would respond when some opponent was able to knock them back a step or two.
High Point did just that in the first half, draining six of six 3-point attempts over a dazzling 10-minute stretch that carved a nine-point lead. There was reason to believe, as I wrote in my game story, that the Deacons would pull it together in plenty of time, which they did once Gaudio directed his defenders to quit sloughing off the guards driving to the basket and thus opening up the perimeter for clean looks. It was a good adjustment, made on the fly, that should provide a nice reference point when the Deacons play Duke and other teams that endeavor to spread defenses all over the court.
Though they gave out in the second half, I was impressed with the energy and purpose with which the Panthers played. It’s early, I know, but I liked what I saw from first-year coach Scott Cherry. Like a lot of other coaches, he needs to stay off the playing floor during play, but he is obviously a man with a plan formulated during his time as a walk-on at North Carolina and later as an assistant at George Mason, Western Kentucky and South Carolina. Craig Keilitz, the director of athletics at High Point, had to get past any anti-Carolina bias he might have picked up during his 12 years as assistant and associate AD at Wake Forest. That said, the Panthers have plenty of Wake Forest ties besides Keilitz. Wes Miller, another ex-Tar Heel whose father Ken is one of the most generous benefactors of Deacon athletics, is an assistant on Cherry’s staff and Tripp Pendergast, a Wake Forest graduate who was an intern under Dean Buchan in the Deacons’ media relations department, is the director of basketball operations. Also Evan Lepler, another Wake grad who I’ve gotten to know well these last few years, was a color analyst for the ISP broadcast. So I was surrounded last night by familiar faces.
It would be fun to see the Panthers made some waves this season in the Big South. Based on what I saw last night—I liked their big man, Cruz Daniels and they have three dangerous shooters in Nick Barbour, Eugene Harris and Tehran Cox—I wouldn’t be surprised.