Scrimmages

We are now three weeks into practice and guys are finally starting to get their legs under them. We are still having a tough time with a couple of guys to do what we ask. It's really tough for players to adjust from being the man in high school to being an "average" player in college. By "average," I mean that you aren't "the man" right away. That rarely happens at the D3 level.

The intensity level at practice needs to increase significantly for us to be better. Our veteran players have a decent understanding of where we want to be in practice but we need to take it up another notch. Our newcomers don't really know what it's like to practice hard. Part of the reason for that is that many of these guys have been allowed to play in cruise control while playing throughout high school. That just can't happen at our level.

We scrimmaged our alums ten days ago today and we came out on top 114-76. Needless to say, there wasn't a lot of defense especially from our alums in the second half. We scored pretty much at will and it certainly gave our guys some confidence.

That confidence was quickly taken away after we scrimmaged D2 Final Four team, St Cloud State. They are ranked in the top ten in two different preseason polls. We scrimmaged them on Monday and got a rude awakening (not Ravishing Rick Rude's finishing move). The Huskies played hard, tough, and executed their offense very well. We certainly didn't back down but their size, strength, and length gave us some problems. We didn't shoot the well very well from the floor, from 3, or from the free throw line in part because of the factors mentioned above.

I do think we gave them a little trouble with our offense. They couldn't seem to keep us in front of them and I believe we forced them in a couple of different zones. We still need to find a balance of attacking the rim and finding our bigs. Our bigs showed that they could hang with their D2 counterparts throughout the scrimmage. Their zones definitely made us stagnant and forced us to change our gameplan. We haven't practiced against zones that much so it took our guys a lot of time to adjust.

Overall, I thought it was a great scrimmage for us because of the learning experience of playing against a high level opponent. They are where we want to be. Our guys are going to have get in the weight room throughout the season and in the offseason for us to challenge them next year when we scrimmage them again.

We have an exhibition game coming up on Tuesday against Concordia-St Paul. They are picked to finish 7th in the NSIC (same league at St Cloud). It will be another great challenge for us. We will open up on the 16th vs. Northwestern (MN) and have a JV game the following night against Northwestern again.

Quote of the blog, "You are what you repeatedly do."