University of San Francisco Athletics

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With the official start of practice still a little more than a month away, USF men's basketball head coach Rex Walters shares his thoughts on this year's team, the point guard position and managing expectations heading into the 2014-15 season.
 
What excites you most about the makeup of this year's roster?
We have a lot of returnees and a lot of new faces, including a few guys who redshirted last year. We return a lot of our scoring and all of our guys know what we are about. There's still going to be some teaching and learning but more of the focus will be on the minute details as opposed to the bigger picture things.
 
We'll be able to stretch ourselves a little but, as well. Two years ago we were doing a lot of teaching and it was a grind every day. Now we are just adding to our package, so we are much further ahead in that regard. Our seniors and juniors can be a great bridge to our freshmen and sophomores. That's healthy transition. It's a veteran group for the most part so I'm not worried about having to coach effort. We're trying to take that next step as a program to go from good to great.
 
Do you feel there's enough depth in the program to absorb the losses of Cole Dickerson and Avry Holmes?
Those are two big losses for sure. The ball was in their hands a lot and when things needed to be decided, we had two really good options to make a play. Saying that, we have the guys who are ready to take that next step. We have options. We can go to Kruize (Pinkins), Mark (Tollefsen), Matt (Glover), Tim (Derksen) or Chris (Adams). All of those guys have made big shots and big plays in clutch situations before.
 
Fair to say this might be one of your deepest and most versatile teams?
We can play small and fast with guys like Frankie (Ferrari) and Devin (Watson) at the guard spots, similar to what we did 3-4 years ago with Cody Doolin and Michael Williams. Or we can go big with guys like Jumbo (Matt Glover), Derksen, Tollefsen, Kruise and Derrell (Robertson). If we want to get real big, we can lean on Derrell and Ticket (Matt Christiansen). There's also Uche (Ofoegbu), Chase (Foster) and Corey (Hilliard). The challenge is to find the best route for us. I don't have the answer to that question yet, but the possibilities are exciting.
 
With the depth on this year's roster, competition is going to fierce for playing time.
Yes it will and that's exciting. The biggest thing that we talked about at the end of the summer was who was going to accept roles once they were defined. Right now, we are in the honeymoon phase. We're on the beach in Maui thinking a lot about the exciting possibilities going forward. At some point, we are going to have to get a job and start paying the bills to be the team we want to be.
 
The loss of Avry Holmes leaves a void at the point guard position, but there isn't a shortage of candidates to fill that role. How do you see the point guard situation playing out?
It's like football, if you have two starting quarterbacks, you really have none. Someone will step up and take the job and run with it. Saying all that, it can change quickly, as we found out last year. We began with Cody (Doolin) and then Jumbo took over for a while before we settled in with Avry. If we started today, I'd say Glover has an edge because of his experience, his ability to defend and his understanding of the system. I thought Frankie (Ferrari) and Devin (Watson) had really good summers and have a good basic understanding of what we want to do. But they are still doing the basic math. We want them then to get to algebra and calculus as quickly as possible.
 
With a solid group of players returning from a 21-win season, what are your expectations of this year's team?
It's too early to set expectations. Right now, it's about getting physically prepared for the season and focus on conditioning, our weight room work and individual workouts. Each team learns at a different rate and as a coach, you have to adjust based on how much they can process and make a part of their games. We are fortunate to have quite a few players that have been in the program for at least a year but you still have to go back to the basics. It's hard to say where we will be at the end of the day but I'd be lying if I didn't say we are working towards winning our league and winning in the NCAA Tournament. Health, identifying and accepting roles and locking into our practices will be the biggest factors in achieving these types of goals.
 
I manage expectations by getting into today only. It's the only thing we have any type of the control over so that's what we are consistently talking about. Yes, we want our guys to know that we believe in the destination of achieving great things but when it's all said and done, we can only get there by taking care of today.
 
What will be some of the areas of concentration during the upcoming individual workouts?
We'll breakdown a lot of our offense and steps to get to the right place on the floor in order to know where the shots will be coming from. We'll spend a lot of time on sideline and closeouts. We'll add a few things once we get to team workouts such as situational defensive schemes.