Georgia State vs. William and Mary
Barefoot for Bare Feet
When: 7 p.m., Wednesday
Where: Sports Arena
The losses still hurt, but after a trip to South Africa this summer, the players and coaches on Georgia State’s basketball team are better able to keep those feelings in perspective.
The team travelled this summer to help Samaritan’s Feet, a charity that coach Ron Hunter has worked with for the past several years. Their goal is to provide shoes and socks to needy children all over the world in an attempt to improve mortality rates.
So already losing 11 games – when it lost 12 all of last season – and the questionable status of the team’s best player in R.J. Hunter, who suffered a foot injury in Saturday’s loss to Delaware, is worrisome to coach Ron Hunter and his players but not world-ending.
“We got off to a rough start,” point guard Devonta White said. “We hit adversity and we have to fight through it. We went to Africa and saw a lot of kids struggling in life and at the end of the day they keep fighting. We took that from there and will apply that.”
The Panthers will get a chance to turn things around on Wednesday, and get a reminder about their trip, when they host William and Mary in the Barefoot for Bare Feet Game. Hunter will coach without shoes and socks, something he has done once a year for the past several years, to raise awareness of Samaritan’s Feet.
White said they frequently reference last summer’s trip, as well as the training they did later with a Navy SEAL at a nearby school, as they try to fight through this year’s troubles, which also include inconsistent play at the point guard and center spots.
But the team has kept fighting, inspired by the some of the destitute conditions they saw in Africa. Hunter said he thinks that’s why many of the losses have come by so few points.
In Saturday’s 86-83 loss to Delaware, the team rallied from an 11-point deficit in the final two minutes, only to lose on a 3-pointer just before the buzzer. In the previous game at Hofstra, the Panthers failed to score for a nine-minute stretch in the first half. The team rallied and took a lead in the game’s final minutes before losing by two points. There has also been one-point loss at Troy and a two-point defeat to Southern Miss.
“Not one kid has quit, not one kid has stopped practicing hard,” Ron Hunter said. “That’s the determination and grit from what we saw this summer. I think it’ll carry through to their careers here.”
Of course, there have also been the ugly losses, such as the overtime defeat at Georgia Southern in which the Panthers blew a 10-point lead in final two minutes of regulation and the 17-point hammering at Drexel.
“We keep fighting but that’s not good enough,” R.J. Hunter said last week. “We have to get off to better starts and when we fight back we have to find out how to win those games, it’s as simple as that.”
The issues have been numerous: inconsistent play at the point, hard-to-quantify production at center, and a lack of maturity that’s a result of the team’s inexperience.
The team started with nine players who didn’t play at Georgia State last year. Hunter compared coaching last year’s team, which was full of experienced players, to this year’s team, which isn’t, like being the head coach of two different teams. He said the freshmen are good athletes, but they aren’t yet good basketball players. Instead of relying on their instincts to allow them just to play, they want to know exactly where they are supposed to go and exactly what they are supposed to do.
That lack of chemistry may be why the team has struggled at the point guard spot, whose job it is to find the open man and keep the offense moving.
White was a preseason all-conference pick, but that was based upon last year’s production when he was a combo guard who averaged 12.9 points who finished with 33 more assists than turnovers. This year, spent mostly as a point guard, his scoring has increased to 14.2 point per game, but he has three more turnovers than assists.
White recognizes that he needs to improve and said he is comfortable with the ball in his hands. Hunter has elected to play freshman David Travers more minutes recently and moving White to the off-guard spot.
“Devonta is a really good player and I think for him to be successful he needs to be at that two,” Hunter said.
They also need improved production at center. Hunter said before the season that the team’s success would likely depend upon James Vincent, a senior. He has shown flashes, such as the nine blocks he had in the home opener against Monmouth. But there have also been games like the loss at Hofstra in which he had two points and two rebounds in 21 minutes. He followed that with another ineffective outing against Delaware in which he missed a dunk and had two shots blocked.
“James has had some bright spots but he’s been inconsistent to say the least,” Hunter said. “It’s not by the lack of his effort. James is only like a first-year guy but he’s playing minutes he’s never played before.”
Georgia State isn’t eligible to play in the Colonial Athletic Association tournament this season because it is moving to the Sun Belt Conference. Because of that, Hunter has flexibility in what he can do this year. To that end, he said he may start to play some of the seldom-used players more to see if they if are capable of playing Division I basketball. Markus Crider, for example, may move into the starting lineup as Hunter contemplates using a smaller lineup, especially if he decides to rest R.J. so that his foot can improve.
Hunter said his goal is to have the team playing its best basketball next January, when they are eligible to compete for the postseason in the Sun Belt with a team that he hopes will by then have learned how to win.
“There’s something you … just have to go through,” Hunter said. “At the end of the day when you think it’s really bad, we talk about what really bad is. When were really mad, or feeling down or feeling depressed, we talk about that trip or that particular kid. We have shoes, we are all really blessed. There’s no reason for us not to keep working."
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