Wake Forest Athletics
Gold Rush Feature: Investing in the Future
3/22/2011 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
March 22, 2011
This article was originally published in the March 19 edition of Gold Rush.
By Sam Walker
In many ways, the 2010-11 men's basketball season has been one of investment. Coach Jeff Bzdelik has said time and time again, "It's all new." And when he says that, he means it's new for everybody. In his first year, he inherited two players with any ACC game experience of which to speak; he had to deal with the loss of Tony Woods, who would have been his most experienced player and an inside presence this team has sorely missed; and he waited out his freshman point guard, Tony Chennault, to return from a broken foot, which delayed his ability to play his way into the point guard role and free C.J. Harris to play his natural off-guard position.
Travis McKie showed he has the potential to become a good and perhaps great ACC player, being named to the ACC All-Freshman Team. He led the team in scoring and rebounding this season. He is the fifth Deacon to complete that feat, putting him alongside the likes of Dickie Hemric, Chris King, Rodney Rogers and James Johnson. To say the least, this has been a season of investment -- investment in a new coach following what really was the end of the Skip Prosser era, which Dino Gaudio, Prosser's friend and colleague, essentially extended. It has been a season of investment in a freshman recruiting class that was ranked 12th by Rivals.com and investment in a new era of Wake Forest basketball. But sometimes you just have to start fresh, and sometimes starting over is painfully hard. The gamut of emotions has run its course and been apparent in post-game press conferences with Bzdelik, a competitive man who has tried to preach patience.
"This group is committed and cares very deeply, which I appreciate as a coach," he said after his team fell 81-67 to Boston College in the first round of the 2011 ACC Tournament in Greensboro on March 10. "The future is bright, and we will get better."
New blood will be added to the mix next year as two have signed national letters of intent -- Chase Fisher, a 6-3 shooting guard from Ripley High School in West Virginia and Daniel Green, a 6-9 forward out of Grapevine, Texas. Time will tell whether they fit into a successful Bzdelik program he so badly wants to build. But as he pointed repeatedly, he's been through this before.
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The people invested who haven't been here before are the players, so this year has been one of hard lessons learned. Take center Ty Walker, for instance, whose own story parallels this season. There was a lot of excitement after Walker verbally committed to Wake Forest in April 2007. After all, who wouldn't be excited about a 7-foot, 230-pound athlete with long arms and athleticism. Walker was rated the second best center prospect and No. 17 overall prospect in the country by rivals.com back then. But with those third-party assessments comes expectations, and when a player with those credentials doesn't turn out to immediately be a contributor, sometimes the results are unfair.
Walker played sparingly his first two years at Wake Forest, averaging 3.8 minutes, 1.1 rebounds and .9 points per game as a freshman and 6.9 minutes, 2.1 points and 1.6 rebounds per game as a sophomore. This year he is a junior in class but a freshman on the court, learning to become the player he was heralded to be coming out of Wilmington's New Hanover High School.
"I was extremely excited to sign here, and I loved the school and still love the school," Walker said. "But my first two years here were emotional. They were difficult. They were time consuming. It was worth it. Going against players like Chas McFarland, David Weaver, Al Farouq Aminu every day in practice prepared me for games to come. I'm still learning and going to learn as much as I can. Coach (Mark) Pope and I are always together working hard, and we're just going to see where I stand from here on out.
"He's like a second father to me, always in my ear. I always listen to what he has to say because I want to be the best coachable player possible. We get up shots, do some hooks, do some conditioning, whatever we can for the game coming up and that's what we work on."
"Ty is an unbelievably good kid," said Pope, Wake Forest assistant and Walker's position coach. "He's a good kid who takes this very seriously. He's just so new. He had 11 points against Virginia, and that was twice as many points as he scored in his entire ACC career in two years. So we go out, have these huge expectations of him, and sometimes we forget how much he has improved. He's gone from playing 17 minutes in two years (total) to playing 17 minutes a game. He's learning and growing and he is gong to grow into himself and be a special player. He just has to keep with it."
Against Miami, Walker had the challenge of defending the talented Reggie Johnson, a player from Winston-Salem who came home to play in front of his family and friends. Everyone knew Johnson was going to bring his A-game, and he did, leading the Hurricanes with 25 points and seven rebounds. But Walker made the effort to try to buffer the impact of Johnson's performance by raising the level of his own play with nine points, five rebounds, four blocks and two assists.
Game in and game out, Walker gets the dubious honor of guarding the competition's best big man. In the process, he has become a good shot blocker, ranking second in the ACC.
"We talk about three things with him every day," Pope said. "We want him to run, sprint on every possession because he can run faster and harder and longer than any big man in our league. We want him to go to the glass every single possession. With his length and athleticism, he can really play volleyball with the ball by himself. He can be in there and be on one side of the rim and then tip it and be on the other side of the rim. And he shows that in moments. And then we talk about engaging in physical play. He needs to get down in his stance and push guys off the block. He's unbelievably better at that (since the start of the season).
"He's basically a freshman. He played 17 minutes total his first two years, so he didn't play at all for two years, and he's not surrounded by veteran players this year. He's surrounded by other freshmen. It's all new, and he's going to get there."
Walker so badly wants to live up to the expectations that were, fair or not, aligned with his signing, but there's no way to learn to play in the ACC without doing it. Now that he is, he is learning from mistakes, learning from his coaches and teammates and doing what he can, when he can to help this team.
"My mother and the coaches always tell me they want to progress and regress, so I always feel I can play better than what I played," Walker said.
"I always hold myself accountable for what I do and have high standards. And I always see myself competing against the best to see where I stand. I'm just going to do what I can to the best of my ability.'
