What Mark Schmidt Said at Media Day
On Tuesday afternoon Mark Schmidt sat down with Chris DiSano at A10 Media day to talk about his club. Here’s a rundown of what was said during the interview in case you missed it. My biggest takeaways from the short conversation were that David Andoh isn’t healing as well as they’d hoped (we’ve heard this before but this news is not good and I wonder what he status is), that Nelson Kaputo got much stronger in the off-season (great news) and that Jay Adams needs to focus on improving as a leader of this team because he’s not a natural “in your face” type of kid. Details below.
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On Adams- “Needs to take that next leap. What needs to change is his leadership. He’s not the most out-spoken guy. He needs to take that next step and be able to pull a guy by the jersey.”
On Taqqee- “When we recruited him he was football player. He’s a gym rat, loves to compete. Every good team needs a player like him. He’s a glue guy. With his work ethic we think he will take that next step.”
On Obokoh- “Physical five man, he will bring that to the team.”
On Stockard- “Long athletic, fits our open court style really well. He learned the system getting hurt last year.”
On Mobley- “Big time scorer, someone we feel can take Posley’s spot. Can really shoot it.”
On Ikpeze- “Long, physical lefty, a bit of a project but he’s been impressive early in practice.”
On Ayeni- “Power forward, physical, plays really hard. Has better skill than I thought he had.”
On Andoh-“He’s coming back slower than we thought he would from surgery. Can shoot it some, we think he will help with the loss of Dion.”
On Coburn- “Lefty two guard, really athletic and can really shoot it from the perimeter. We think he can come in and give us some minutes as a freshman.”
On Kaputo- “Pass first point guard who put on 20 pounds since last year, he got much stronger. Had an up and down freshman season. He’s a screen and roll type whose good with the ball. We expect him to elevate his game. He will play with Jay as well as spell Jay this season.”
On Rebounding- “The team that out rebounds a team is going to win. They’re more physical and aggressive. Looking at the stats last year we were only plus one last year, we want to be plus three of four. We’ve got to get better at that than we were last season. We need to get back to that and need to get better at it this season.“
On Pittsburgh- “It’s a home run coming back here. Being here for six years coaching at Robert Morris, this is not a good city it’s a great city. My wife is from here, my boys were raised here during those years. The stripe, south side, station square and Mount Washington. There’s so much to do here. It’s a great sports town and if you win they will come. This is going to be a great March for us.
The following quotes taken from The B.V. Sports Twitter feed:
“I haven’t discussed with the team anything about the NCAA selection since that day really. Kids are resilient. What happened last year was a travesty. What’s upsetting is what happened to Marcus and Dion. I would assume if you talk to the kids they would say they’re motivated to not let them happen again and to put destiny into their own hands.”
“Florida is a good team but there’s a lot of alums in that area who will come to that game. We wish we could play more but you just can’t play all these teams on the road. We had a 29 RPI last year and we didn’t get in. I’m not sure we can do better than that no matter who we play. The NCAA has different reasons why teams get in.
