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BIG TEN CONFERENCE MEDIA DAYS (MEN)

October 29, 2009

Bill Carmody

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

THE MODERATOR: Coach Bill Carmody is entering his tenth season with the Wildcats and welcomes back four starters from last year and earned a berth into the post-season NIT.
Coach, we'll start with an opening statement and then questions.
COACH CARMODY: It's nice being back, seeing some familiar faces, some unfamiliar ones. But we've had almost two weeks of practice. And November's a funny time, because you start doing one thing, you're working on defense and then you want to move to the next thing but you don't know if you really have it down.
So it's a screwy time, actually. We do have a veteran team. We lost Craig Moore, who led the Big Ten in 3-point shooting a couple of years in a row. But we have some young guys who I think are improved. And we had a positive year last year. People are excited about it because we beat some pretty good teams. But those teams also beat us. And now we have to back it up and do better than splitting with teams.
We were 8-10 in the conference. And you have to do better than that. You shoot for winning your home games and stealing some on the road, and I think that's a pretty good formula for success. And going from post-season NIT to finally making it to the NCAA.
So we're excited. The guys look pretty good so far. And just getting going, trying to take care of business day to day.
THE MODERATOR: Questions.

Q. How are the sophomores and the freshmen looking now that you're a couple weeks into official practice?
COACH CARMODY: We started two freshmen last year, Kyle Rowley and Johnny Shurna. Rowley broke a bone in his foot in the summer and he's just getting back now. But he played a lot this summer, and I think he's really going to help us.
Shurna, as some of you may know, made the Under-19 team that went to New Zealand and won the gold medal. He is confident about his ability, looks good. And Luka Mirkovic added about 15, 18 pounds and is playing that way, much more physically than he did last year. And then go along with those guys and Kevin Coble, Mike Thompson, and Jeremy Nash. Things look pretty decent. There's some depth there.
I think in years before this maybe our ninth guy wasn't -- there was a big drop-off between 5, 8 and 9, and I don't think that's the case this year. I think we can go a little deeper this year, and so I'm looking forward to that.

Q. I know you have a lot of kids from Chicago, as does Bruce Weber. But a lot of them get away. How hard is it to recruit and keep kids in state?
COACH CARMODY: Well, I mean, years ago when I came here, I don't think we had any Chicago kids. I'm trying to think. I don't think so. And so we sort of made it a priority to try to get Chicago kids and also the suburbs, because you're getting good players in the near suburbs now.
I don't think the teams are quite as good, generally speaking, but the players are. There's one or two players that are very good. So we sort of -- we're trying to mine that a little bit.
And Chicago is a hotbed of basketball. So you're not keeping other coaches out of it. So you just have to show them what you have and try and get on them early, like any kind of recruiting.
And you hope they see the benefits of your school over other schools that come in usually a little later than you do because you've had access to them earlier, probably.

Q. Bill, it used to be that kids were being recruited as juniors and seniors. Now they're being recruited as eighth graders, ninth graders. Is this a healthy thing for the NCAA for them to step in and do something about that? Or do you think that this is just the way that it's going?
COACH CARMODY: I don't think it's healthy. And it is the way it's going. And I'm not sure the solution, I mean, what to do. But can you limit it to high school kids? Because you have to recruit freshmen.
You have to at least introduce them to your schools. Things have accelerated over the last ten years, five years, even three years. You're playing so much AU basketball now you play 25 games in your high school schedule probably in the summer they play, summer and spring they play 75 games. So kids are getting better sooner.
And because they're playing against different, better competition. And just playing more games. And so I don't know what the answer is. But like I said I don't think it is healthy. I don't really think it's healthy to recruit freshmen. But it's just the way it's gone.

Q. Tom Izzo just said this is the year for you guys to make the tournament. There's a lot of that talk. Do you welcome that pressure?
COACH CARMODY: Yeah, I don't think it's that much pressure. If you have some good players, which I think we do, we look forward to it. That's why you're here. There's 330 Division I teams and that's everyone's goal right now to get in the NCAA. And we're just really looking forward to it. It's going to be a tough year in the conference. That's the only thing.
I think we have probably one of our better teams coming up. But just looking around from top to bottom that the league is very strong and so it's going to be difficult. But I don't see it's really pressure. I think the guys sort of embrace that.

Q. Where does Drew Crawford factor into the rotation at this point?
COACH CARMODY: Drew Crawford is a true freshman from Naperville. We lost Moore who is a long-range shooter. Drew makes shots, but he's not the kind of shooter that Craig is. But I think I'm going to throw him in there because he's a pretty athletic kid. He can score -- makes a jump shot. Gets to the basket a little bit. Gets a few rebounds, couple blocked shots.
I think he's going to be a very good player for us. So might have to live with a few mistakes here and there early, but I like the way he goes about his business. Smart kid, tough kid, and I think he's going to help us.

Q. After missing the tournament last season, did you feel like your nonconference schedule you could have used maybe some tougher opponents or do you think you put together a schedule properly?
COACH CARMODY: I don't think that it matters. I think we had a pretty tough out of conference schedule. You play 30 games and 19 or 20 of them -- 19 are against -- if you just play one game in the Big Ten tournament against conference foes and then you have the Big Ten-ACC challenge, and we had DePaul last year and Stanford. We had some pretty decent teams in there, and Florida State in the challenge.
I think we lost a couple of games that we sort of gave away and that was the difference.
But you try to -- every program is at a different stage. So you're trying to balance that out wins and tough schedule and RPI and all that kind of stuff.
But I think that last year we hit it just about right. And I think if we held on to a couple of leads, I think we would have gotten into the tournament last year.
THE MODERATOR: Thank you, Coach.

End of FastScripts

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