Will Wade looks to lead a team into the Round of 32 in the NCAA Tournament for a fourth time.
Grayson Mann – Staff Writer – 23 hours ago
PROVIDENCE – In his availability on Wednesday in the Amica Mutual Pavilion, many entered the room feeling Will Wade would dive deep into Clemson.
He did, just not the way people thought.
Wade stated on Selection Sunday that the team doesn’t even practice when Clemson football plays, adding that they had to make a slight chance to the schedule when the Tigers played SMU in the ACC Championship.
“We had to change our pregame schedule up around the ACC title game this year,” Wade said. “It took them too long to kick the damn field goal, but they all know that. Now, it’s a little hairy when LSU played Clemson for the national title when I was at LSU, but I mean, they all know that that’s the one kind of reprieve I have is I like watching their football program play.”
Wade added that he follows recruiting closely and was tapped in when the Tigers landed seven commitments in four days.
Just like the approach his team has to have on Thursday, when he sees Orange on the other end, he knows it has to be all business.
When it comes to actually taking down the Tigers, Wade once again referred to Clemson’s size as something they have to navigate. On Selection Sunday, he described the Tigers’ frontcourt as “huge,” and after days of preparation, that thought hasn’t changed.
Wade added that beating that type of physicality is easier said than done.
“It sounds great standing up here, but if we can keep the ball out of the paint, which would be a modern miracle, and we can value the ball and not let (Jaeden) Zackery just take the ball from us, and then we need to force him into some turnovers where we can get out in transition against some easy baskets,” Wade said. “It’s going to be tough sledding against their half-court defense.”
Wade’s honesty has been a noted element of his media availability; as he puts it, he tells it like it is.
When it comes to articulating the challenges that Clemson will present on Thursday, he isn’t shy about expressing those feelings.
There will be plenty of emotion on the floor as both squads take the floor in Providence, but both have recent experience in the tournament.
The Big Dance carries plenty of bright lights, but for Wade and McNeese, it can only be business as usual.
Wade transcript
Q. Coach, you talked a lot about this year is different. When talking to Heath yesterday, he called it more business-like. Now that you’re here, how does it feel different than last year?
WILL WADE: I think last year everything was so new to everybody. I think once we made the NCAA Tournament, we had not been in a long time. Everyone exhaled. I think now the kids who came back, we brought back over half the roster. We added some new guys and they all understand we want to do more this coming season, so I think everybody is still excited.
It’s hard to be here, it’s hard to not get excited. It’s hard to get here, so it’s hard to not be excited when you get here. But I think everybody understands we really want to try to win a game or two and try to advance in this thing and it’s not just so giddy about getting here. Last year we were giddy about just being here and it was almost like a field trip. This year it’s much more about our business and about, hey, let’s see if we can do the things we need to do to try to win a game, or maybe more than one, but we’ll start at one.
Q. Obviously a lot of physicality on Clemson, five guys over 6 foot 9 inches or above, so how do you handle that and apply that to the game tomorrow night?
WILL WADE: We’ll see. We need to be better against it than we were last year, so, look, there’s a difference in the levels. It’s like football, the difference between FCS… it’s on the line of scrimmage, right? Basketball, it’s the big guys. So we’re a little smaller, quicker. We got to try to play to our advantages and they try to play to their advantages, which is pound the ball on the inside and annihilate us in the paint. We have to try to play to our advantage, having some quickness. They have one of the premier rebounders in the country. They have a great front line, a great coach, a great scheme, so it’s a lot easier said than done.
Q. Last year after the Gonzaga game you said you wanted to get to this game and improve from this spot. You think you have done enough, and what else do you need to do?
WILL WADE: We’ll find out. We have a better positional side, but we don’t have a big center. You can’t lead in our league with a big center. We would be sitting the kid for a long time with a big ol’ center. The goal would be to win the Southland. We have better size in the one through the four. We just don’t have a center. Not in a traditional sense. I think we improved at the margins.
Have we improved enough? We’ll see tomorrow afternoon.
Q. You’ve been open and honest and talked about your experience at Clemson and your players talked about what this would mean and all these different things. In a day and age where so many people are willing to go, oh, it’s about the game, you can’t focus on that stuff and shy away from admitting and being honest about that stuff, why be open? Why be honest? Why share the truth?
WILL WADE: All the players know we don’t practice when Clemson plays football. They got these three hours on a Saturday. They all know. They joke with me about it. We had to change our pre-game schedule up around the ACC title game this year. Took them too long to kick the damn field goal, but, you know, they all know that.
Look, I’ve always been at — I’m at an FCS football school now, was at VCU. It was hairy when LSU played Clemson for the national title but they know that. That’s the one reprieve I have. I like watching their football program play. It was no secret to them. One of my assistants is one of the all-time great players at Clemson. He’s still top five in steals at Clemson. I was a manager, he was obviously a player. I always joke between the two of us, we scored a thousand points, but he scored them all.
Our guys know that, look, I follow the basketball program loosely, not as close as football. I graduated in ’05, so I’m a relic. It won’t be any different when we’re playing them. This is the first time I have played against them. We’re hitting our stride, then.
Q. You just mentioned yourself being a manager. I wanted to ask about your manager (Amir ‘Aura’ Khan) who got a certain amount of viral fame. Is the person we see on screen or on our phones, who is he behind the scenes and what has he done to help elevate this program a little bit?
WILL WADE: Yeah, first off, he’s a servant leader in the sense that when I was a manager at Clemson, you’re at a bigger school. You have scholarship money we can divvy out. We’re McNeese. We have no scholarship money. This is strictly volunteer. When we got the job, we had no managers, we had nothing. He volunteered and he gets there at 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning every morning.
He’s working hard. I joked with him. He’s our clock guy, which is the hardest thing to do in practice. You have to know the scoring in each of the drills. I said, man, all this fame is getting to your head. You have to buckle in.
No, he’s a great kid, comes from a great family. His father is a doctor in town and it’s been surprising. I’m not watching when we go out. I’m back in the back doing my breathing exercises and stuff when they’re doing all that so I didn’t know anything about it until P.J., who is in here now, our social media guy, he filmed it and I’m not on social media either, so my special assistant shows me all this stuff and he says, hey, Amir is blowing up.
I’m happy for him, our kids are happy for him. He’s a big sports fan. He wants to be a journalist. He’s graduating in sports management. He’s an oddity. He grew up a DePaul fan. We always joke with him about DePaul basketball. He knows a ton. He’s just a really, really good person, really low key outside the viral video, I guess.
Q. What are you like when you watch Clemson football? Do you ever rip coaches?
WILL WADE: (Laughter) It’s hard to rip Dabo. I get nervous. I follow it. I follow the recruiting closely. I followed… big recruiting week a couple weeks ago. I follow all that stuff pretty closely. I’ve gotten better as the years go on. Of course, winning a couple National Championships helps, too. I’m not nearly as into it now as I was, but the further I get away from graduating, the less I’m into it. But I do get nervous. I don’t rip the coaching. I know how hard coaching is.
Q. You mentioned Vernon and you talked about how he watches every Clemson game. Does that help with scouting?
WILL WADE: Vern worked with Coach Brownell. He worked for him when he got back from playing overseas. He has a familiarity with him, certainly.
Q. How do you address, if you do, some of the chatter about your future with the program with your players to keep them in the moment?
WILL WADE: We addressed it head on. I talked to them Saturday about it. Here’s what it is, here is where we are. It was just me and our players and we all talked about it. I’m aware of what I have got going on. They’re aware of what we’ve got going on. You just hit it head-on. We’re all on the same page with everything.
Q. I want to follow up on that. Rumors linking you to NC State, specifically. Have you, your agent, anyone close to you spoken to NC State?
WILL WADE: Yes.
Q. I have a macro question, Will. The reason you’re on this journey back through McNeese is the NCAA infractions process. We’re in a world that’s rapidly changing. April 7th, I think, there’s a new infraction process coming from outside that’s supposed to uphold some of the rules they struggled to uphold. As you have come back to the new world we’re in now, what is your perspective?
WILL WADE: I think it’s evolving. It doesn’t affect us as much at McNeese as it does at other places, but I think it’s slowly evolving, unfortunately, through the courts. It would have been better, probably, if it was done not kind of piecemealed through the courts like we have now. If we had a little foresight on some things. But I’m all for the student-athletes having opportunities and having the ability to move around.
I told our coaching staff last year I don’t want to hear any complaining about calling kids in the portal while we’re in the NCAA Tournament. Half the coaching staff are in the country — those assistants are trying to get other jobs, too. If they’re trying to get other jobs, why can’t the kids? That makes intuitive sense to me. I think it’s moving in a good direction with the revenue share, and I haven’t followed it all that closely. I know there’s going to be a clearinghouse with the NIL deals so it seems positive. We’re going to share the revenue and make sure the NIL is actually NIL, for the most part. I think it’s moving in a good direction.
Q. Getting back to the game tomorrow, what do you guys have to do well to come out with a win over Clemson?
WILL WADE: We got to guard the paint, keep the ball out of the paint as best we can. We got to not turn the ball over and we got to try to force some turnovers. That’s easier said than done. Sounds great standing up here, but if we can keep the ball out of the paint, which would be a modern miracle, if we can value the ball and not just let Zackery take the ball from us, we need to force him into some turnovers where we can get out in transition and get easy baskets. It’s going to be tough sledding against their halfcourt defense.
Q. The Noon Time Basketball Association… do you ever play Dabo Swinney in basketball?
WILL WADE: No, he was an assistant there. I’m not a very good player.
Q. You mentioned being honest with your players and with us just now. Where does that come from, taking that philosophy? That’s kind of rare among coaches.
WILL WADE: Just tell it like it is. You may not always like what I’m going to say, but I’m going to tell you what I think. I’ve always kind of been like that, and there’s no need to hide it. The guys are reading it on social media. It’s no secret. I’m not going to ask them to do something I’m not willing to do. It’s no good if you don’t address it and if you sit there and BS them. They can read right through the BS, so you might as well, hey, this is what it is. Here we are, and we’ll figure it out.
Players transcript
Q. For both you guys, we’ll start with Christian. We talked yesterday, but just talk about the excitement of physically being here. Are you ready to practice here again?
CHRISTIAN SHUMATE: It’s very exciting. Grateful to have the opportunity to be here once again. We’re excited to be here, but we’re excited to play. We’re going to go out and practice today and get a feel for the environment and, you know, just start to get things flowing and getting the mindset to play and win some games, and we are excited to be here.
Q. Anything to add, Javohn?
JAVOHN GARCIA: Oh, sorry. Like Christian said, we’re excited to be back here this year. We’re going to be practicing today, getting a feel for the court and later on we’re going to practice and work on ourselves and see the team we play, what type of stuff they run and stuff like that, so we’re excited.
Q. For both you guys, how much did last year’s experience give you a better feel for coming into this game?
CHRISTIAN SHUMATE: Well, last year it was good to get the experience, and your whole life you kind of look forward and dream of moments like that. When you get to them, you feel as if that’s what you were waiting for the whole time and being able to have that experience is kind of… it’s great to have had that experience, but you almost are unsatisfied after having it, especially when you get the opportunity again because you want more and we got a lot of guys on the team who strive more and want to do great things. So now it’s good to have had that experience, but we’re just hungry. We got a lot of guys, me, JG, everybody on the team, just thirsty to win, thirsty to play again and thirsty to have more time together around each other and make more moments happen.
JAVOHN GARCIA: Yeah, just going off what Christian said, this year we’re more hungry. Last year it was definitely an experience to come here and play, but this year we want to make something, make a run and win some games this year, and just being around each other more and have fun.
Q. Christian, for you, last year you guys went up against a tall, physical Gonzaga team. This team is very similar. They have five players 6’9″ and above. How did you learn from that going up against a physical team?
CHRISTIAN SHUMATE: Yeah, it was… we learned a lot about our team from that game, and I think moving forward from that point and building our team this year, we kind of had that in the back of our minds, and knowing that that was what it was like to play one of those teams. And we had a lot of tests early on in conference to set ourselves up for success within the last year’s Gonzaga game earlier on in the season, and I think we have done a better job preparing for the outcome of something like that happening. I think it’s something we can match. I think it’s something we can overcome. It’s something that we can adjust to. And like you said, last year we experienced something like that, I think we’re prepared, and like I said earlier, hungry to meet the challenge, hungry to try to overcome it.
Q. I’m wondering if you can go into the Amir thing a little bit. The viralness of it and how did it start? Is this something… the character or whoever he is in all these videos, is that who he is, what he was? How has that helped get this program excited about playing basketball.
JAVOHN GARCIA: It’s happened, they just recorded him one game, but he has been doing it every game. He’s the same person every day. He’s an amazing person to be around. He always comes around and tries to cheer everyone up on and off the court. He’s just an amazing type of person and he’s a good person to be around.
The hype is, like, real and all that. He’s hyping everyone up and has our university really big right now, and I just feel like I love it for him just because that’s the type of person he is.
CHRISTIAN SHUMATE: Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. That’s who Amir is. He’s always been the same person and always uplifting everyone around him, super goofy and that’s who he is. He’s a funny person. One day it was just a clip of what we do all the time and it caught on. It was super viral and then everybody got a chance to see him how we see him and that was basically the story.
His game? He’s nice. He can put a ball in the cup.
Q. Christian, I would imagine after last season you probably had some options to maybe move up to high major if you wanted to and you obviously decided to run it back. I wonder what went into that decision, why were you comfortable staying at McNeese and whatever you are willing to share, what went into your choice of weighing? What went into that?
CHRISTIAN SHUMATE: I was happy. I was happy with my teammates, my coaches. I love the city. I love my coaches. I love my teammates. I just couldn’t find a reason to run from happiness, you know? I was fine where I was and I just felt comfortable making that decision.
Q. Question for both of you guys, what about Will Wade drew you to play for him and what makes him a good coach in your mind?
JAVOHN GARCIA: His loyalty is definitely number one, knowing we — well, me and Christian came from different schools and loyalty is a big thing and he wins. It’s hard to not play for a coach that wins and he’s loyal to you and he will do anything for you to make sure you’re straight after this, and when you’re with him, I will say that goes a long way.
CHRISTIAN SHUMATE: Yeah, kind of the same thing. The last question was kind of going into this one as well, my answer. Loyalty means a lot to a lot of people and that’s kind of how I look to be, and there were people around us and our team and coaching staff. We were all loyal to each other and we fit in together and we had something good going. So it’s kind of easier when you realize those things.
And as far as Wade, all those things apply to him in our relationship that he has with everyone and that’s kind of what you look for most and what you want to find in someone you play for.
Q. Just following up on Coach Wade. He’s a Clemson alum. Is that something that’s been mentioned at all? I think he talked about you guys don’t practice on Clemson football game days. Is that meaningful to you guys to play his alma mater?
JAVOHN GARCIA: It’s definitely been a thing. He told us how bad he wants this one and we’ve just been taking it all in. Everyone as a team, we have been practicing real heavy knowing what’s at stake, and it’s also Coach Burns’ alum, too. They have been telling us about it. We got to get the win for them guys.
Q. And for both you guys, JG, for you first, would you agree that this trip is more business-like for you guys?
JAVOHN GARCIA: It definitely feels a lot different from last year. I said before in the press back at Lake Charles. After the game last year, we were excited to be there. This year, we all have one goal: We’re not done yet. We want to win games here, and it can change everyone’s life after we win a few games. We all know what we’re up against and we have to take advantage of it.
Q. I was going to ask a similar question about last year. Is there some power in going through what you went through last year and it ended so fast and the way it did? Does that stick with you?
CHRISTIAN SHUMATE: Yeah, I would say it does. You got a glimpse of a great experience, but you just know that it can be so much more. I think it kind of just leaves you with a feeling of wanting more, like I said earlier. It’s always great to have that experience, but kind of like JG was just saying, last year we thought it was enough to have an opportunity and this year it’s more so business.
There’s just an overall different mindset from last year’s time and this year’s time. Confidence-wise, mindset-wise, everyone is ready. We all think we can achieve the same thing as behind our walls and we’re ready to show that.
Q. You guys hear the rumors of your coach and all that. How have you stayed focused through all that?
JAVOHN GARCIA: Coach Wade always tells us, don’t worry about the outside noise. We just worry about what’s going on now. We’re going to take one day at a time, one game at a time and just play it like it’s our last. We don’t care about everything else that’s going on with that type of stuff so we’re just going to worry about what’s going on now.
Tags: Clemson Basketball
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