Game Notes

MOBILE, Ala. – With 10 days of practice behind them, the University of South Alabama men’s basketball program will head north to Ontario, Canada for three exhibition games starting Monday night.

The Jaguars will take on Windsor Monday and Thursday, and Western (Ont.) Tuesday. All three games will start at 6 p.m. CDT.

In-game updates will be available on Twitter (@SouthAlaMBK) and full recaps will be posted to USAJaguars.com.

“I’m probably not as excited as the players are,” said USA head coach Ronnie Arrow. “Not that I don’t want to go, have fun and see where the guys are at, but we don’t have nearly everything in. As a coach, you want it to be as perfect as it can get. I think the guys have worked really hard and their intensity has been really good. I was hoping some of the returning guys would have retained more than what they did, but as far as the intensity level is concerned, there’s no question our guys have competed. I think they’re ready to play.”

Playing in a different country means playing by a different set of rules. All three games will be played under FIBA standards, which include a 24-second shot clock and eight seconds to cross the timeline, among other differences. The team used a few of those new rules in its intrasquad scrimmage Friday afternoon.

“That’s a major deal—24 seconds goes by in a heartbeat,” Arrow noted. “You have eight seconds in the backcourt and you can knock the ball off the rim—Javier (Carter) should have a field day with that. Those are the ones that they have to understand. There are some that the coaches have to understand too. You can’t get a timeout when you want it—you have to wait for the next deadball.

“We have worked on the 24-second shot clock, mainly for guys with the ball, if there are six seconds left on the clock, we have some things we do to get into a quickie offense. That’s important because it doesn’t matter if you have a 24-second clock or 35-second clock, when it hits six seconds, we want our team to understand that we have to get to our quick offense.”

An unfamiliar atmosphere will not result in a relaxed attitude towards the games. The players and staff will treat them the same as any regular-season game. However, there will be an emphasis on player rotation to give everyone an ample amount of playing time.

“In my opinion, you always go to win,” Arrow commented. “You don’t ever go to do anything else but to win. But in saying that, there’s some rhyme and reason to all of this. We want to play everybody; needless to say everybody can’t play 30 minutes, but we want to give everybody an opportunity to get in the game, see where they’re at mentally and physically, especially the point guard spot. We didn’t want to make it head-knocking this early—it’s a long season, we wanted to get in what we could now, but we realize we don’t want to run them into the ground right now. Naturally, we’d like to win all three games, but we want everybody to show what they’ve learned.”

One of the key position battles that Arrow can get an early look at is point guard. The Jaguars were near the bottom of the conference rankings in assist/turnover ratio and turnover margin last season, but Arrow has seen some improvement over the summer. Incumbent Trey Anderson (Carrollton, Texas), a senior, will be pushed by junior college transfer—and former Towson guard—Dre Connor (Lauderhill, Fla.) and freshman Barrington Stevens (Allen, Texas). Anderson led all players with seven assists in the scrimmage last week with just two turnovers.

“It’s been a battle,” Arrow said of the competition at point guard. “I think the new guys don’t care who has been in the program. They’ve battled every day. Trey, because he was here last year, is much further ahead. The other guys have caught up as far as what’s expected of them. The biggest thing with all new guys at this level is the intensity and physicality they have to face every day in practice.”

Windsor, Monday and Thursday’s opponent, finished the 2011-12 campaign with an 18-11 overall record and a 15-7 mark in league play. In last year’s exhibition season, the Lancers split a pair of games with Oakland University, with the loss coming in double overtime. Western compiled a 10-19 ledger a season ago.

“We have three games of Windsor’s from last year,” Arrow said. “They have about four offensive sets they like to run and they run a lot of Princeton stuff. They have seven guys back from last year. Their posts can shoot and they have two very good guards—(Josh) Collins and (Enrico) Diloreto—that can really shoot. They’re going to be a lot like the teams we played in Canada before. We didn’t win every game that we played then, but at the end of that year we were in the championship game playing to go to the NCAA Tournament.”

For more information about South Alabama athletics, check back with www.usajaguars.com, and follow the Jaguars at www.twitter.com/USAJaguarSports. Season tickets for all Jaguar athletic events can be purchased by calling (251) 461-1USA (1872).

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