Villanova basketball is truly blessed to have a great coaching staff. Two of those guys, Baker Dunleavy and Ashley Howard, who are not just well respected assistant coaches but also great guys who can really relate to their players, stopped by last night at the semi-annual, "Recruiting Junkies Dinner".
I go to this event twice a year to keep in touch with many of the best recruiting gurus in the biz and many Philadelphia basketball "power brokers" who attend the event to talk about Philly HS basketball, college hoops, and mostly recruiting.
At the Fall dinner we always collect donations for the Coaches vs. Cancer and a City Six coach comes by to collect the donations, say a few words about the importance of the fight against cancer, and then talk about the upcoming college basketball season.
I just about broke my hand taking copious notes while Bake and Ash did a great job with their remarks and a Q&A ... here are the highlights:
Opening Remarks:
Baker Dunleavy: For all of you who have seen our teams over the years, we are going to be pretty similar. We are going to have a lot of guards running around chucking up a lot of threes and trying to create some turnovers, playing hard. This is probably our team, since our '06 team, that might shoot the ball from the perimeter the best that we have - but we will be challenged in terms of height. We are going to start probably three guards, including Josh Hart who is about 6-4 and then Kris Jenkins, 6-5 but thicker, and then Daniel Ochefu who is about 6-11. So we will be a team that is going to have to develop toughness, a kind of grittiness throughout the year and we are already working on that. Coach Wright is grinding these guys every day in practice. That will be our challenge. We are looking forward to a great year.
What we have had the benefit of over the last couple years is great leadership from upperclassmen and I think this year will be no different. We will have Daniel Ochefu and Ryan Arcidiacono back as Seniors. That has been what has been really able to set us apart from other teams in our league. We have had some normally powerful teams in our league be young the last two seasons and that experience has kind of differentiated ourselves from schools that have one-and-dones and guys that are kind of in-and-out - super talented but not as experienced. It is something we are looking to take advantage of again this year. We are excited about our guys.
Ashley Howard: We are going to be similar to what we have been in the past. We have great leadership from Ryan Arcidiacono and Daniel Ochefu. Those guys have been really setting the tone in practice every day and Coach has been really challenging our younger guys because the one thing that I think will be the difference early on is that the last couple years we have had older guys - Dylan Ennis who was a third year college guy, Tony Chennault, who was a reserve for us but had been a starter in the ACC … but now we have younger guys that will be coming off the bench for us. We will be really counting on those guys and they have responded so far in the preseason. We are looking forward to seeing how those guys develop. They will be a huge part of our success this season. They are not shorting us with effort every day so I am confident that those guys will get to the point where we will be able to depend on them the same way we have been able to depend on those guys who have come off the bench for us in the past.
Note: Coach Dunleavy then went on to describe the Cats Schedule - the highlight quote was "The Big Five always provides tournament-like intensity in terms of the environment in which you play." He also talked about a conscience effort by Villanova to front-load the OOC schedule more given the realignment of the Big East.
to be continued ...
