BATON ROUGE – Calling his Tigers “enthusiastic and eager to learn,” Coach Johnny Jones opened his third season as head coach of the LSU Fighting Tigers basketball team with a 2 hour and 23 minute practice session that feature many teaching aspects of the game.
LSU is a month away from its exhibition game on Nov. 7 with Morehouse College and will open the 2014-15 season on Nov. 15 at noon against Gardner-Webb. The Tigers won 20 games last year and advanced to the second-round of the NIT and return, among others, sophomores Jarell Martin and Jordan Mickey, who both appeared on one of the selected All-SEC teams in 2014.
“We’re excited to get started for the first full-day of practice. The guys came out like they were supposed to be. They got after it. They were enthusiastic and eager to learn,” said Coach Jones, whose 39 wins in his first two seasons is the most by any LSU coach in their first two years at the helm in the SEC era. “We were able to put some new things in and they picked them up well. I thought the new guys did an excellent job of picking things up and allowed us to do a lot of things in our first day. We got a lot accomplished.”
A lot accomplished meant covering some of the basic fundamentals of the game including conditioning, passing and rebounding before the practice moved to work on transition defense and offense along with some principles of the break.
“We got a lot accomplished in terms of our first practice,” said Jones of the Tigers, who will also practice Thursday and Friday before taking the weekend off. “I really liked our energy level and how hard they worked and how quickly they picked things up. Obviously, we have a lot of things to clean up and a long ways to go but it really was encouraging what we saw with this group for the first time.”
The LSU men’s and women’s basketball team will appear before the public at the second Bayou Madness on Friday, Oct. 17 at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center. The event will begin outside at 6:45 p.m. with a pep rally and then on-court activities will begin at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free.
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