It’s still a work in progress for head coach Mike White and the Florida Gators basketball team.
As the Gators head into week two of practice fatigue is setting in but the enthusiasm is still rising—and Coach White is making sure of it.
“We’re coming off a practice where we struggled more than others. Our first subpar practice was [Wednesday], so we’re gonna crank it up a notch [Thursday] and get right at some competition a little earlier than we have been. Sometimes after you’ve been going a week and a half, ten days, however long it has been, they’re all running together a bit right now, that freshness can wear off and you’ve got to dig a little deeper and continue doing those hard things you don’t necessarily like doing—transition defense, blocking out, all the dirty work—so we’ll get back at that.”
One thing that Coach White has emphasized since his arrival is communication. Many of his guys, especially older ones, have always led by example, but White has asked that they lead by communication as well. This means speaking up on the floor—a practice that White hopes will carry over to games come November.
So far he has seen improvement in this area with both veterans and young guys.
“With this team, compared to last years team, you have a couple [of guys] that didn’t play [last year] that talk a whole lot,” says White.
“The first guys that come to mind are John Egbunu and Brandone Francis-Ramirez. Both those guys are very vocal. Dorian [Finney-Smith] as a 5th year senior has challenged himself to be more vocal. To not only lead by example but to call guys out when they need calling out and get guys in right positions at right times. And then we’ve challenged our point guards; both of those guys aren’t extremely extroverted in Kasey and Chris but they both know the game and need to direct traffic at a higher level. So overall we need to do it by committee and at a higher level.”
Redshirt freshman Francis-Ramirez, who is one of those guys White sees stepping up, has picked up this communication gauntlet, implementing it with guys like true freshman KeVaughn Allen.
“He’s a great kid,” says BFS of Allen.
“I think he’s gonna help us a lot. He’s a great talent. Like anyone on this team, he’s got a lot of stuff he’s got to learn and that’s why I’m here. Even though I’m a freshman, I’m a little bit older than these guys. I’ve been playing the game with old guys back home so I don’t mind helping anybody and I also get help from the seniors like [Alex] Murphy, Kasey, Dorian I mean we got to help each other.”
Their strides are showing primarily defensively, which is where White says they’ve spent the majority of their practices so far and was evident in a recent scrimmage—a scrimmage that even has some offensive flash.
“I would say Doe-Doe was really good offensively,” says White.
“Schuyler Rimmer was really good offensively. I think between those two guys they were 11-11 from the field. If we get that every night we’d be pretty good. I’m not sure we can count on that. It was really competitive. The defensive pressure was really good I thought, led by Chris and Kasey. I wanna say Kasey had four steals in a 20 minute period. So just overall the competitiveness I was really pleased with.”
White will play with the competitiveness through lineups as practice proceeds, but says for the most part, things will stay basic.
“We’ve been pretty much injury free so we’ve been able to play fours and fives together with a couple of wings and have two very capable point guards so that we always have Chris and Kasey butting heads, so conventional lineups for the most part in practice.”
There’s a little less than a month now before the Florida Gators tip off the 2015-2106 season, and Coach Mike White will continue to grow his team slow and steady to build a fast start on the court.