RAINBOW BASKETBALL
JAMM AQUINO / JAQUINO@STARBULLETIN.COM
Bobby Nash of Hawaii and Zerek Knight of Tennessee-Martin chased after a loose ball during Thursday night's game.
|
|
’Bows leave drama behind
There is no time to worry about next year with WAC play starting Thursday
With the drama of the previous day's events in the rear-view mirror, the Hawaii basketball team's focus was fixed on the road ahead yesterday.
About 24 hours after Riley Wallace voiced his feelings about leaving the program at season's end from behind a podium on Friday, the coach was back in Gym II as the Rainbow Warriors prepared to open Western Athletic Conference play.
"It's the third season, as I've always said since I've been here," Wallace said. "You've got the pre-Rainbow (Classic), the Rainbow and the WAC. You hope you can put all three seasons together and that gets you to the fourth season, the postseason."
The Rainbows went through those first two phases at 9-4, starting the season with a 5-4 mark, then sweeping to the Rainbow Classic title and beating Tennessee-Martin last Thursday in a final tune-up for the WAC schedule.
The Rainbows will spend New Year's Day traveling from Honolulu to Las Cruces, N.M., where they open their WAC schedule against New Mexico State on Thursday. The arduous trip continues to Ruston, La., for Saturday's game against Louisiana Tech.
"This is the most exciting part of the year," forward Bobby Nash said. "You go on the road and you test out what you've been practicing all this time, and this is where it counts."
The Rainbows have already played five games away from home and face a tough test to open the WAC. New Mexico State (9-3) was picked second in the conference preseason polls and goes for its ninth straight win when the Aggies play at Chicago State tomorrow.
With All-WAC forward Paul Millsap now in the NBA, Louisiana Tech has struggled to a 2-10 start but has won the last five meetings with Hawaii.
The Rainbows are riding a five-game winning streak into the league opener and went though a 2-hour practice yesterday after taking Friday off. With the WAC season at hand, the urgency in the gym has picked up a notch.
"You can tell it's just a lot more intense," guard Matt Lojeski said. "You can tell there's a difference right now, the atmosphere, the chemistry, everything."
The Rainbows took a little while in preseason practices to pick up the system on offense and defense, but have progressed to the point where Wallace says they're now ahead of the pace of last season's team.
Wallace cited the early-season experience and simply seeing the offense and defense function in game situations as a key to the team's growth through the first 13 games.
"They came out and were confident and said, 'we can do this,' and they started believing in the scouting report and started feeling the offense a little bit better," he said.
"We go out now and we're in more of an attack mode on defense and offense than we were earlier. Now they're seeing what can be done and how it works and they buy into it a little bit better."
Facing conference foes familiar with the schemes means having to execute with even greater precision starting this week.
"When you get into WAC time everything has to be sharp and we have to limit our turnovers," Nash said. "That was a knock on us in the preseason was that we had a lot of turnovers. We had a great practice today, the guys were working hard, we just have to come out and play up to our potential."
With their longest road trip of the season directly ahead, Friday's press conference focusing on Wallace's departure in April and the future of the program didn't distract the team from their current task.
"That has nothing to do with our team this year," Lojeski said. "He's still our coach this year, nothing's changed. Everybody's focused on what we need to do and we're ready to get on the road and get into WAC play."
Note: UH forward Ahmet Gueye practiced yesterday after missing last Thursday's win over Tennessee-Martin with pain in his surgically-repaired knee. Guard John Wilder also sat out the game with the flu and was back yesterday.