It’s been four years since Drake’s once-in-a-generation run to the top of the Valley, and as Mark Phelps enters his fourth season as the head man in Des Moines, he finally has a team with more upperclassmen than underclassmen, and finally has a team returning more than two of its’ top scorers from the year before. Talking to him at media day this week, his enthusiasm to finally be coaching a veteran team was obvious.
“This league, we have some terrific players, I think if you look at especially the young guys last year — Jake and Doug and Rayvonte — those are three guys that distinguished themselves as freshmen as some of the better players. But overall, this is still a league where you have success with upperclassmen. We’re excited once we get all of our guys back healthy that we’ll have one of those teams that has some experience and some physical maturity.
In our league, that’s how you make a move — you have talented guys who are older. Young guys don’t typically carry teams in the Missouri Valley.”
The Bulldogs took a foreign trip Down Under this summer, giving all those returning players an opportunity to get extra practice time in, and get even more experience playing together. Some coaches prefer to save those trips, which teams can only take once every four years, for a summer when his team has a lot of newcomers. Phelps thinks it can be equally effective in helping a veteran team.
“We went to New Zealand and Australia, which was a terrific trip and a tremendous time. We learned a lot about our guys. I think our players developed a greater trust in each other, got to know each other better, developed team chemistry, and then we were able to come off that trip and into the preseason.
I think the thing that these trips do for you is it really puts a spotlight on the things that you need to work on. A lot of times you go into the fall and you have the previous year to determine who you are, and you go into the fall based on that. But things change. We were able to focus this fall in our preseason and the early part of our practice on exactly what we need to do to improve, based on what we saw in our foreign trip.
Basketball in Australia at the pro level is a very good quality. It will really help us. So will the ten extra practices. You’re basically playing a mini-season. You see your guys in practice and you see how it transfers in a game.”
Another thing the trip afforded them was the chance for their new assistant coaches to get to know the players, as there are three new coaches on the bench — Stan Johnson, Jamelle McMillan and Brett Nelson. Nelson is a name that should be familiar to Jays fans, as he was the starting two-guard for the 2002 Florida Gators that lost to Creighton in the NCAA Tournament (he played 47 minutes in that game, going 4-19 from the floor and 2-10 from three-point range).
There’s another name familiar to Creighton fans on the Drake bench:
“The only guy that wasn’t returning for us as a player, Ryan Wiedel, is now a graduate assistant for us. That’s another thing the trip allowed us to do, is to get to know each other as a staff and allow our staff to get to know our players.”
Now that they’re back stateside, how has practice been going? And how’s Seth VanDeest’s injured shoulder progressing? According to Phelps, VanDeest isn’t the only one fighting an injury.
“We’ve been dealing with some nagging injuries. Certainly, the ones that are most concerning are Reese Uhlenhopp and Seth VanDeest who probably today (Tuesday) are still another seven or eight weeks before they can return to action. We’ll certainly do what’s best for those guys and take it day-by-day when are able to return to the practice court.
We’ve had some guys out with some minor things in the first ten days of practice, too. We haven’t been able to have our whole team together at all. We’ve actually had some coaches practicing — it’s a good thing we have some coaches that can still play a little bit so the practices have been competitive.”
Phelps says their focus will be on defense this year — not that it hasn’t been in previous years, he’s quick to point out — but they see defense as the area they can most stand to improve.
“Our guys have heard about defense a lot from us. We’ve dug up some statistics from last year that aren’t too pretty and that’s been a big focus of our team. They’ve embraced that message.”
One issue Phelps understandably didn’t want to address was the two-game suspensions doled out to Rayvonte Rice and Kurt Alexander, who were arrested for allegedly shoplifting this summer. Rice was chosen to the All-Freshman and All-Newcomer teams last year after leading the team in points, rebounds, blocks (26) and steals (44), while setting the school’s freshman scoring record with 428 points.
“The same things we saw out of Rayvonte last year, we’re going to see more of. He has the rare ability to impact the game in a lot of different areas.”
VanDeest, who Phelps mentioned will be out another 7-8 weeks, is a strong candidate to redshirt. His loss would be devastating, as the 6’11”, 244 pound junior led the team in rebounds eight times a year ago, grew as a passer (leading them in assists eight times as well), and was one of the league’s better interior players by season’s end.
Filling in for VanDeest will be Kraidon Woods, a 6’9″ senior who had a solid first season in Des Moines last year. He’s been around, originally committing to Villanova, then backing out to go to Arizona State where he played two years, followed by a transfer to Binghamton. He never played a game there, transferring a second time to Drake and averaging 3.9 points and 4.1 rebounds with 25 blocks for the Bulldogs as a junior.
“I think Kraidon is going to have a big senior season. He’s chomping at the bit to get out there and show what type of player he really is. He’s certainly a high-major athlete and is ready to go.”
One of the frontcourt starters who returns is 6’8″ junior Ben Simons, a player that moved into the starting five during conference play a year ago and wound up averaging 8 points and 2 rebounds a game. He continued improving this summer in Australia, averaging over 17 points for the trip.
“Ben’s on a steady upward tick in terms of his improvement. I think he’s going to have another good step of improvement going into his junior year. He’s really an intelligent player, and he’s a tremendous shooter. We’re expecting big things out of Ben, and I think he’s ready to deliver on that.”
Jordan Clarke is another frontcourt player that moved into the starting five once MVC play started last year. Clarke is a giant human being at 6’8″, 253 pounds, and averaged 5.3 points with 4.7 rebounds a game a year ago.
“Jordan has size, strength and intelligence, and is a guy who can defend. He’s a physical presence at both ends of the court and has really improved his ability to score, especially close to the rim. He’ll get to the line a lot, too.”
The Bulldogs have a respectable slate of games in the non-conference, though depending on how the injuries shake out, they could be playing short-handed through the toughest stretch of their non-conference schedule. They play Ole Miss and Marquette in the Paradise Jam tourney in the Virgin Islands, travel to Boise State and Iowa, and take on Iowa State, Air Force and Eastern Michigan at home. It’s not a great schedule, but there aren’t any cupcakes, either.
Phelps thinks the Bulldogs can take a step forward this year, maybe to a fourth or fifth place finish if they get a few breaks. Two months ago, I would have tended to agree. But now with Rice and Alexander facing suspensions, Van Deest potentially out for the season, and a ton of question marks in their place, they’re potentially staring at another Thursday night play-in game in St. Louis. The media picked them to finish seventh, and that’s probably about right in this year’s top-heavy Valley.