Aug. 10, 2009
VIEW PHOTO GALLERY
Editor’s Note: Assistant coach Brad Frederick is filing daily reports from the team’s foreign trip to Australia. Monday’s blog includes the team’s first exhibition game and a mishap with a pair of hair clippers. Also check out Coach Frederick’s from Day 3 in the gallery above.
By Brad Frederick
Greetings. Today really feels like our second day, as everything up until this morning seemed like one really long day. Despite our best efforts to prevent our guys from going to sleep too early Sunday, some couldn’t make it long past dinner. Roomies Lance Goulbourne and Elliott Cole went to sleep around 6 pm. Of course, the downside to that is when you wake up at 4 am. By the time we all get adjusted, it will most likely be time to leave.
The structure of this trip is far different then our in-season road trips. Normally we have night before the game meetings, shootarounds, walk-thru sessions, pregame meals, etc. with everything gearing towards game time. Today, our players were totally on their own up until when the bus left for the 45-minute bus ride to Dandenong for the game. In fact, our guys have not practiced since Thursday.
Although the basketball portion of this trip is not as intense as it will be during the season, their is something special about these trips. This trip marks our third foreign trip under Coach Stallings. 10 years ago this month, we took our first Vanderbilt team to France and Italy. That team, led by Dan Langhi, James Strong, and Atiba Prater, had a successful season that ended with us narrowly missing the 2000 NCAA Tournament. Some people, like me, still feel that team should have been in the tournament. 6 years ago this month, we took took the 2003-04 team to Spain. That team, led by Matt Freije, Russell Lakey, and Scott Hundley, brought everyone back from an 11-18 team and ended the year in the Sweet 16. Countless times those teams pointed to their bonding experiences overseas as something that helped give them a jump start on having great years. We certainly hope our guys can reap the same benefit from this trip.
When we signed AJ three years ago, we talked with him about bringing the team to Australia. We have been waiting for the right time to take this trip and this summer seems to work about as well as you could hope for. We return our whole team and only add one freshman. John Jenkins is in the unfortunate position of not being able to go, because incoming freshmen are not eligible to participate or travel with us. We call it the “Dan Cage spot” because Dan was the only member of the 03-04 team who couldn’t go to Spain.
When we initially began planning this trip, we were afraid we would not be able to go because of the economic conditions facing everyone right now. Fortunately for us, Coach Stallings decided to pay for this trip himself. Although he is probably going to kill me for mentioning this, I think it shows how much value he places on this trip.
On to the stuff most of you are really interested in…
We played the Dandenong Rangers tonight and won 107-84 in front of 1,100 fans. Some stats from the game: Jeff Taylor led us in scoring with 26 points on 10-13 shooting, including 3-5 from 3. AJ Ogilvy had a dominant first half and finished with 23 points and 16 rebounds. Jermaine Beal added 10 points, 6 assists, and 4 steals. Brad Tinsley had 9 points and 7 assists. Festus Ezeli had 9 points, 12 rebounds, and 3 crowd-pleasing blocks. Lance Goulbourne added 9 points, Darshawn McClellan and Steve Tchiengang had 6 points each.
We jumped out to a 31-14 first quarter lead and extended it to 54-30 at half. We won the rebounding battle 69-52.
Quotes from Coach Stallings: “I was really pleased with the effort. We had some outstanding individual performances. AJ Ogilvy and Jeff Taylor played really well and Festus Ezeli gave us a great effort off the bench.”
“I think Brad and Jermaine suffered from a little bit of jet lag and didn’t shoot the ball well, but still managed to make plays. Overall, I think it was a good start to our trip.”
A couple final thoughts from tonight… The basketball community here in Melbourne seems to be very excited about our visit. The combination of AJ and a SEC team led Dandenong to add two of Australia’s Olympic team members, Mark Worthington and Chris Anstey, just for our game tonight… I am not saying that we faced hometown refs, or “black and whites” as they call them here, but they shot 43 free throws to our 20. Worthington went to the line 22 times…
Hopefully you are able to see the pictures from my phone that I have sent back. You might notice Darshawn is bald. He did not arrive here bald, however. Lance was attempting to give him a trim this morning when the electric razor “melted” in his hand due to a fuse shortage. The razor caught fire and Lance managed to run the razor right up Darshawn’s hairline. Thus, Darshawn had to pull out the straight razor and go totally bald. Good comedy. We play our second game tomorrow night versus Kilsyth and we have heard they are also bringing some good players in for our game. Until then, goodnight from Melbourne.