Great effort during first weekend of practice, working on defensive fundamentals and transition offense

By Rob Senderoff

Head Coach

Since the last time I blogged we have had two great practices, one Saturday and one Sunday.

On Saturday, we spent a lot of time working on defensive fundamentals and on our transition offense after made baskets and missed baskets. The thing I liked the most about it was the competitiveness of the practice. Obviously, everyone was excited with that being the first day of practice.

The excitement didn’t let up after Saturday. When we came back on Sunday, we brought in some MAC officials and we worked about 90-percent of our time on our transition game, both offense and defense. Having officials allowed us to clean up some fouls, and it also allowed us to play in more game-like conditions.

We will be off today, but we will come back on Tuesday, watching film in the morning and lifting weights prior to practice. We will spend the rest of this week not only working on defense and transition game, but we’ll be able to break things down more this week because we will finally have the M.A.C. Center set up for practice conditions. With the volleyball game on Saturday we only had two baskets available, so this week we’ll get to do much more breakdown stuff throughout the week.

I have been very pleased so far with the work of a lot of our guys. I thought Kris Brewer did a very nice job this weekend of leading the team. It was also great to have Kellon Thomas back in practice. He looked good and more importantly he felt pain free.

I think some of our new guys are trying to pick up the pace of what we do, but certainly we had some guys show some flashes this weekend. To single out a couple of guys, Jimmy Hall and Marvin Jones showed some nice flashes during the two days.

The guy I’m most proud of now in terms of his development is Khaliq Spicer. He looked like a different player. He is much more confident and much more sure of himself, and he is playing that way.

Khaliq Spicer throws down a dunk during a drill on Saturday as Kent State Men's Basketball opened practice