[dropcap]Saturday[/dropcap] morning marked the official start of the Creighton men’s basketball season as head coach Greg McDermott and his staff ran players through their first team practice of the 2015-16 season.
The offseason came and went like a blink of an eye in large part due to the fact that an overseas summer trip to Italy allowed the team to have 10 practices from mid-July to early-August. Those practices proved valuable to a team that has 10 players on its active roster who did not play a single minute last season.
According to McDermott, everyone retained a good portion of the system that the coaches tried to implement during the summer, giving the Bluejays a bit of a head start on the upcoming season.
“It’s not perfect, but we’re certainly a lot farther ahead than we normally would be,” McDermott said. “I’ve been pleased with our two workouts, we’re moving in the right direction.”
There are still plenty of obstacles ahead for this group, especially among the six true freshman that will be put through two practices each day for the first time in their post-high school career, the first of which took place on Sunday with one session in the morning and one in the afternoon. Those days will test them mentally as much as physically.
“Their challenge is consistency,” McDermott said. “Being able to play through fatigue, being a little bit sore, being a little bit mentally tired, because we’re throwing all kinds of new things at them, and being able to overcome all of that. That’s their biggest challenge. If they can get through the first 10 days or so that will subside, but it takes some effort, at least in the early going.”
In his sixth season at Creighton, McDermott is anxious to get these pre-season practices underway and he expects to see a steady improvement in a variety of areas from an inexperienced group between now and tip-off of their first regular season game on November 14th against Texas Southern.
“This team has a lot of room to grow, which is really exciting,” McDermott said. “Defensively, I think we’ve got some of our base defense, the fundamental parts of it in. Now our execution just has to get better. And just playing at the pace we want to play at on the offensive end of the court, and doing it consistently. That’s not easy in practice over the course of two and a half hours, that’s a lot of work, but if we can do it in practice on a daily basis I think it will be easy to carry over to the games.
“This is a fun group to be around. They work hard, they get along well together. It makes it fun to be at practice.”
As excited as McDermott or anyone else on the team might be to get the ball rolling on the season, it pales in comparison to how junior guard Isaiah Zierden feels. The sharpshooter from Minneapolis, Minnesota practiced for the first time on Saturday since tearing a knee ligament late in the first half against Butler back on January 21st.
“I’m really at a loss for words about it,” Zierden said of how it felt to be back in the mix with his teammates on the practice floor. “I’m so grateful to be back, and I don’t take it for granted at all. I thought the first time coming back from it, I loved the game so much that I didn’t take it for granted either, but now especially knowing that it could be over at any time I just absolutely love being out here. No matter what kind of practice or game, I’m just happy to be back.”
Coming off a second season-ending injury on the same knee, the junior guard says he has even more to prove compared to when he came back from it prior to last season.
“I’m very very motivated,” Zierden said. “I thought the first time I had a bunch of people telling me that I couldn’t do it, but this time I even had people close to me telling me that I wouldn’t be the same. That’s one of the things that you look at and say, ‘well, they don’t think I can do it, so let me prove it to even the people who are close to me.’ I’m extremely motivated.
“I’ve watched a lot of Steph Curry and, obviously I’ve watched Kobe, because that’s my favorite player. He motivates me, because he has that internal drive, and I want to get that. I’m extremely motivated, and I’m excited to be back.”
Zierden’s motivation didn’t only grow from the outside. On bad days he would he would even doubt himself. As hard as it was to come back physically, it also took a toll on him mentally at times.
“It was extremely tough,” Zierden said. “On those days, and I had a few of them, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I didn’t, because I did. I would call my dad on those days. I’d be frustrated and I’d talk to him for a little bit, but sometimes that doesn’t even help. Sometimes I just had to get away; I locked myself in my room for a couple hours and just listened to music, either laid in bed or just played some X-Box. Just to get away from everything, because the more that I put the doubt into my mind, I knew that other people were going to feed off that and try to keep putting me down so that I couldn’t come back. You just try to get through those days and you know there are going to be more good days than bad.”
Creighton’s head coach says the mental hurdle is the last one Zierden needs to clear before he can get back to being the player he believes he can be.
“That’s the biggest challenge,” McDermott said. “When you have the same injury twice, you have to get to the point where you don’t think about it when you’re playing, and I think he’s moving in that direction. Obviously the more rehab you do the stronger it is, and the least chance it’s going to happen again. I think his doctors have convinced him that that knee is probably stronger than the other one now, so just go out and play and enjoy the game.”
