Weight room yields camaraderie and broken records

Note: Kellon Thomas is a junior on the Kent State men's basketball team and is working for the Athletics Communication department during the Summer to fulfill a requirement of his Practicum I in Sport Administration course. As part of this course, Kellon will be doing a weekly blog to give fans an inside look at how the Golden Flashes are preparing for the 2014-15 season.

Kellon Thomas broke Mike
McKee's power clean record for
Kent State guards this past week.

Our team has now completed seven weeks of summer training, with just one more left. We did testing and maxing out in the weight room this past week, which is different than our usual weight training. Coach Bob spent all summer training to us to get strong, faster and more explosive, and then tested us this week to see our progress.

On Tuesday we did our power clean test, and I broke the program record for guards at 274 pounds. Our director of ops, Mike McKee, was the previous record holder at 270 pounds back in 2009. All of my teammates, Coach Bob, and even Coach McKee, were cheering and motivating me throughout the lift. It was a great feeling after I had completed the lift, and everyone was going crazy and celebrating .Khaliq Spicer, my roommate and probably the teammate I am closest with, lifted me up as if we had won a championship.

It felt good to break the record, but it felt even better that I had the support of my teammates. I like how unselfish we are as a team, and one person’s success excites us all. We have learned to push each other, compete, and be great teammates all in what seems like a short 7 weeks looking back.

Even though it was testing week in the weight room, we still had our two 30-minute individuals and our one-hour team practice. We continued working on some basic concepts we put in to help us for our upcoming year, such as our base offenses, defensive strategies, and ball screen offense and defense.

We worked a lot on post entries and playing out of the post, which I think this will be a bigger emphasis this year. We have great guard play, but we will also have a great presence down low this upcoming season with the addition of guys like Jimmy Hall, Raasean Davis, Blake Vedder and Marvin Jones. I feel like our returning bigs—Khaliq, Chris Ortiz and Marquiez Lawrence— have all shown improvement throughout the summer as well.

The intensity last practice was very good and we were all competing. We have to continue to push ourselves and try to get better each time so that we can be one of the top teams in our league.