Open practice

By Harold

The Duke basketball team held two open practices last week. Since my plan to sneak into Cameron and watch a game is still in the formative stage, I figured this could be my last chance in a while to see the players up close. It also was an opportunity to see how Coach K runs a practice (although he refrained from his normal screaming and cursing).

Both practices started with at least 15 minutes of stretching. Considering I usually spend about 15 seconds stretching, I’m thinking maybe I should change my pregame routine. The next thing that stuck with me is that, as far as I could tell, all the drills happened at full speed. Diving to the floor, defenders taking charges, the whole bit. It got to the point where I wanted them to slow down so they wouldn’t get hurt.

Coach K obviously wasn’t going to divulge some major strategies in front of the general public, but the little bit I heard was the same advice that I would expect from a high school coach — for instance, the ball travels faster than a person (so pass more, dribble less). So while I wasn’t going to get any great basketball insight, I was able to get an overall impression of a Duke practice — every second is scripted, there’s no down time to get distracted, every assistant has a role in every drill. And it’s like that for two hours a day, almost every day for six months, until the inevitable cold shooting night from a perimeter-oriented team (Gerald Henderson 0-for-16 anyone?) that inevitably ends the season.

After watching one Duke football practice before the season, I gave the fearless prediction of 6-6, more wins than any season since 1994. Well, right now the football team is 4-3, with back-to-back conference wins for the first time since… 1994. So emboldened, I will now give my basketball prediction: 31-7, NCAA Elite Eight. We have great guards that will lead us to a regular-season championship in a very competitive conference, but we still don’t have a dominant big man that has led us to previous NCAA finals (Elton Brand, Carlos Boozer, Christian Laettner, etc).