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Collins Recaps Opening Weekend Of Practice
10/15/2007 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
DURHAM, N.C. -- Duke assistant coach Chris Collins checked in with GoDuke.com on Monday to recap the opening weekend of men's basketball practice. Collins, who joined the staff prior to the 2000-01 season, has helped guide the Blue Devils to a 204-42 record and five ACC Championships over the past seven seasons.
We are really excited about finally getting started with official practices. Because of the mid-semester Fall Break, all of our guys were able to go home for about 5 days before practice started to get refreshed physically and mentally for the season. The best thing about starting official practices is that we are able to work with our guys on the court on a daily basis and really start to put in our system with different lineups on the court. In the preseason, we are only allowed to work with the guys for two hours per week on the court.
We had our first practice on Friday night at 9:30 p.m. at the conclusion of the volleyball team's big win over Georgia Tech. We didn't have any kind of open practice or Midnight Madness event. We will save our first public showing for the fans for the Blue/White game on Oct 27th. We always like to have a spirited, competitive practice on the first day to see what we are working with right away. It was great to see how enthusiastic and energetic all of the guys were and what great attitudes they all have. Each player knows that all playing time will be earned and there are no starting spots set in stone. We feel that we have a lot of good players and competition at every position. When guys push each other in practice, it raises everyone's level and that is when you can have a special team.
The emphasis of the first practice was on our defense. We do a lot of different drills to teach our guys the right positions to be on defense and we really emphasize communication and talk with everything we do. Defensive drills are also a great way to get in tip-top physical condition. Right away, we could see the hard preseason training regimen that our players endured paying off. The coaching staff was very pleased with the conditioning of our guys at this point of the year. The credit for that goes to William Stephens, our Strength and Conditioning coach, who we feel is the best in the business. The next thing we like to accomplish in the first practice is to see different lineups and units playing together to see how everyone fits right away. It's a great way to start developing roles and chemistry within the team. The best part of the practice was seeing how competitive each of the guys' were. No matter what the units were, each team had five good players to make the scrimmages extremely hard fought. It was very exciting for the coaches to see. We worked hard for about 2 1/2 hours. We always begin and end each of our workouts with stretching so that we stay away from pulled muscles and soreness.
We came back and practiced again on Saturday afternoon. This practice was really geared on working on our offensive execution and game situations. Because of the depth our team, we are really working on pushing the ball up the court and attacking. We should be able to really spread the floor this year and create mismatch problems. Again, we switched up lineups throughout the practice and watched how different groups played with one another. We feel that each of our guys has different strengths that they bring to the table and the chemistry on the team is very good so far. We are still working on getting David McClure back to 100% and Brian Zoubek will use the next month to get himself back in great shape as well. That will give us 11 guys that we feel are all capable of helping us be successful. Each of our veterans have come back as a better player from last year, and all three of our freshmen are talented and ready to play.
We're excited to keep going with our practices and adding things with each day. It's a long journey and it was finally great to get started on it this weekend.
Players Mentioned
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Tuesday, March 31
Tuesday, March 31
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