BATON ROUGE — The LSU men’s basketball team began preparations for their Labor Day weekend trip to Canada with a one hour and 50-minute practice Friday afternoon in the auxiliary gymnasium of the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.
The practice, under NCAA rules, was restricted to veteran players — senior Dameon Mason, juniors Chris Johnson, Tasmin Mitchell, Garrett Temple and Terry Martin and sophomores Greg Terrebonne and Alex Farrer — as the new players are not allowed to practice until Monday when classes begin at LSU.
Coach John Brady put the players through several 5-on-0 play drills for about the first hour of practice before Associate Head Coach Butch Pierre and later assistant coach John Treloar took charge of various drills in the session. The players closed the practice with a challenging conditioning drill.
“We are going to get in about 11 practices,” said Brady. “In past years we have started school a week earlier, but we don’t start until Monday so our new players couldn’t go. It’s a crash course in how to play a game, but I think it’s going to be good for our team to assemble them, put them through some drills, let them have the feeling of playing together and going through some practices early on.
“They (the returning players) picked up on some new things I threw at them quite quickly,” the 11th year coach of the Tigers said. “I was really pleased with the response offensively to some things we are going to do a little different because we have a different type of team. So I threw some things at them I think we may carry over and they picked it up pretty well and hopefully that will be good for our team to do a few new things offensively.”
Temple did practice with the team during many of the 5-on-0 drills while continuing to come back from an ankle injury aggravated during summer pick-up games.
The veterans will practice once on Saturday before taking Sunday off and the entire team will convene for the first of two practices early Monday morning.
LSU departs for Canada on the night of Aug. 31 and will play the University of Guelph on Sept. 1, York University on Sept. 2 and the University of Toronto on Sept. 3 before returning to Baton Rouge that evening.