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BIG 12 CONFERENCE MEN'S MEDIA DAYOctober 15, 2014Scott DrewKANSAS CITY, MISSOURI COACH DREW: I know everyone is excited about those Royals. Good to see everyone this morning. A lot of exciting times at Baylor. You got a new football stadium. A great football team. I know with our basketball team we're excited with practices under way. When you lose over 50 percent of your scoring and your rebounding, coaches are excited because that means you have a lot of things to work on and a lot of opportunities to help new guys take a step forward. With that being said, I do like the highlights a little bit better being played right now than the last time we were in this gym and lost the championship game in the Big 12 Tournament. Q. Jonathan Motley, what impresses you most about him, and how is he going to help you this season? COACH DREW: The first thing is he's really improved his body. Charlie Melton, our strength coach, has done a great job with him. Johnathan's worked hard in the weight room. He is up to 237. As most coaches will tell you, that freshman year, if you redshirt and you're able to focus on academics, adjust to college socially, be able to understand time management, and at the same time, be able to go against Cory Jefferson and Isaiah Austin every day in practice, that's really going to be beneficial. Definitely this year he'll be able to show all the hard work he's put in. Q. Scott, you talked about the scoring that you lost. Is it more scoring by committee, or are you looking for a couple of guys that can give you 15, 20 a night? COACH DREW: I think with our team this year, the great thing is we have a lot of versatility and a lot of depth. So I would think we'll be a team that will be tougher to prepare for because there won't just be one or two people you can focus and key on. I think every coach will tell you preparing for a team that has six double figure scorers is tougher than if there's just one or two. I think this year's team, they compete, they work hard every day, and at the same time, really all of them enjoy seeing their teammates score. There's not a ball stopper or someone that really demands the ball. Q. You've got your returning players. How comforting is it that one of them is a senior point guard like Kenny Chery? COACH DREW: Any time you have two great senior leaders like Kenny Chery and Royce O'Neale, both diligent players, hardworking players. They represent the program and the school the right way. Servant leaders. Everybody on the team looks up to them because they care about everybody, and they're not I guys or ego guys. When you have a senior point guard, like in football if you have a senior quarterback, it just makes things move a lot better. Kenny is someone that's become a lot more boisterous in practice. So he's done a great job of helping the young guys on where they need to be and how they need to do things. Very excited about his senior year. Q. A little off topic here, but obviously in college sports with what's happened with Todd Gurley, with what's happened with Jameis Winston, autographs have become a hot topic. You've had a number of high profile guys go through Baylor. I'm sure you'll have some in the future. What do you tell those guys when they're approached about autographs? You want to accommodate the fans, but you also don't want to see stuff on eBay as well. COACH DREW: I think that's really your compliance office and how well they do making sure that information gets passed on to the student‑athletes. And then as coaches, obviously, any time there's situations that occur, we make sure that we reinforce that with our student‑athletes. It's much better to learn from someone else rather than your own mistake. So any time that we have a chance to educate our student‑athletes, we're going to do that, and again our compliance office meets with the student‑athletes every year at the beginning of the year, summertime, at the end of the year, and just make sure they're reminded of all the rules. I think it becomes more real, in reality, when you have high profile players such as the two you just named being questioned. Q. I think you've had about a week with them. What have you seen from the newcomers? Are the freshmen still wide‑eyed, or are they going to be able to contribute this year? COACH DREW: I think, when you have a chance to work with guys in the summertime, that really helps and gives them a chance to be successful come fall when you start practices. So with Damien Durham and T.J. Maston that were here this summer, that makes it easier for them come summertime. With Deng Deng‑‑ you can call him Deng or Deng Deng ‑‑ a junior college player, and he was coming off surgery, and he wasn't able to do much this summer because he was recovering from that. So he's really progressed in the last month tremendously from being back out on the floor and getting a feel for playing with the guys. Lester Medford, our junior college recruit, wasn't here this summer either. He's somebody that in September was able to, through the strength and conditioning and the individual workouts was able to get himself in shape, get himself acclimated, get used to playing with the guys. To answer the question, the two junior college guys are coming along, two freshmen. Summertime definitely helped prepare them. We'll know more about our team the next couple weeks when we have our scrimmages and get a chance to see what direction and who's stepping forward then. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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