At some point, every young basketball player who takes the game seriously, runs into a situation where life’s realities threaten to turn off the fun like an eclipse can block out the sun. ADVERTISING At some point, every young basketball
At some point, every young basketball player who takes the game seriously, runs into a situation where life’s realities threaten to turn off the fun like an eclipse can block out the sun.
In a nutshell, that was the narrative of the 2016-17 men’s team at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, where some necessary ingredients for growth seemed to be in place but the team soon found itself off the path, disagreeing amongst themselves, losing focus off in the weeds.
A 6-foot-11 recruit bailed out just before the season with a heart ailment, which altered plans for those who play around the basket, and as the season developed, it became clear that there wasn’t enough size up front to compete against the best teams on a consistent basis. Personality issues surfaced, players barked and snapped at each other with increasing frequency as the season went along. Coach GE Coleman eventually removed one of the top seven players from the team, sending him home from a late-season road trip.
It wasn’t a fun time to be a Vulcans’ basketball player.
“About half the time,” point guard Ryley Callaghan said last week in a telephone interview, “it was like babysitting or something, it wasn’t any fun and it wasn’t what I wanted it to be when I got there.”
This, then is the offseason when critical work needs to be done to change the culture, that buzzword phrase you hear a lot these days. The culture has been a part of basketball and specific teams as long as there have been games to play, but only recently have people begun to grasp the importance of a healthy team culture.
In Division II basketball, it might be as important as anything this side of having better players at every position than your opponents. The former can be achieved, the latter is a kind of pipe dream.
“We need to turn the page on all that stuff,” Coleman said, “and I think we have the kind of group we need to do that; it has to happen.”
The responsibility for the change will come from everyone on the roster, but, as in life, the burdens aren’t always equally shared. Callaghan, the senior point guard, knows an outsized portion of leadership will again be on his shoulders.
Sophomore wing Eric Wattree will also take more than an average share of the burden of change. A former high school teammate of Callaghan’s, Wattree is considered a key element in the program, maybe even a transformative player who is expected to take his game — and the Vulcans — to a higher level in the fall.
To get there, Callaghan, the team leader, and Wattree, the talented assistant in this context, are changing their games over the summer.
The secret is jumping rope.
Seriously.
“I’ve seen it work with guys over the years,” Coleman said. “I first heard about it with Pete Maravich, I know Press (the father and coach of “Pistol Pete”), had him jumping rope all the time and they both talked about how much it helped.
“It can really improve your lateral movement and your jumping ability,” Coleman said. “There’s a big variety of drills and if you can do them and stick with them, the results will be there and the results are huge for your self-confidence as a player.”
That self confidence radiates out to the team and brings the group together if you have the right leader. Callaghan accepts the role.
“I had heard about (jumping rope),” Callaghan said, “but I never used it in a real serious way. We started working on it after some talks with GE, about three weeks or so before the end of school, but by now, the difference is obvious.
“When I came to UHH, my biggest issue was the lack of lateral movement,” he said. “It affects your quickness and I was a little tentative at this level right at first. I talked to my dad in the season and he said, ‘You’re not playing like you always played,’ and I knew what he meant.”
Callaghan arrived last year as the designated leader and point guard of a team he’d just joined. It wasn’t that he took someone else’s position — the previous year’s set of guards had moved on — but he was new and needed to keep everyone involved as he transitioned into his role.
It’s a tricky thing, importing leadership. It was obvious to everyone from the very start that Callaghan was the right guy for the job, yet there’s something in human nature that throws up concerns about the new guy coming in to the drive the bus.
He was expected to make all the right decisions, all the time, in practices and games. It can be a difficult role, especially on a team with only seven players ready to find their way into games. The ones who have to play realize there’s no competition for their role, and that can weaken the message of team unity.
“I was too unselfish, really,” Callaghan said. “I’m a scoring point guard but I started out too much involved with taking care of everyone else. I fell into that thing and finally realized I was trying to do too much for everyone else.”
The change for Callaghan happened near the end of the season — before a season-ending injury — when he had three games in which he averaged just under 23 points a game, finishing with a scoring average of 11.2.
The light bulb that went on right at the end of the season and the more recent daily jump-rope daily discipline has encouraged him from a physical standpoint.
“I’m quicker now,” he said, “and I’m dunking a lot more. I used to dunk every once in a while, now it feels like I can do it any time I want.
“If I can stick with this (jumping rope) routine, I’m telling you, there will not be a player in the Pacific West Conference who can frickin’ guard me. I can’t wait to get started again.”
Wattree is also feeling off-season inspiration.
“It was probably the toughest year I ever had in basketball,” Wattree said of the 2016-17 season. “I was new, a freshman in a group of older players, I wasn’t sure about my role, then I hurt my ankle and it was like I could never fully be the player I needed to be.
“At the end of the season, GE had a long talk with us, basically saying we can’t tolerate the BS, the stuff that was going on last year, we need to be a family, we need to believe in each other and work for each other.”
Wattree now places no ceiling on his aspirations.
“Last year GE kept telling me he believed in me, he had confidence in me and he wasn’t going to chew me out for doing what I need to do.
“In my mind, you have to set the bar high for yourself,” Wattree said. “My goal, honestly, is that I truly believe I can become an All-American, that’s what I want to do, that’s my focus, but it isn’t hurt being in a team concept, it will be helped by being in a team concept.”
It will be Coleman’s fifth season in Hilo and the first time with a recruiting budget that is essentially half of what the other 13 schools have, that he actually has a structure of talent awaiting the new recruits.
A point guard who feels he can’t be stopped and a wing with All-America visions represent the kind of pieces needed to, as they say, make the jump to the next level.
