I do believe if Cal doesn’t win another championship, his time at UK will be considered a failure. As a retired Indiana high school coach I’m not a fan of publicly bashing coaches. As a life-long UK fan it’s hard for me to watch the decline of the program. We have seen the worst regular season, worst tourney defeat (I witnessed in person), worst regular season lose (Evansville), lost all-time wins, lost longest consecutive 3pt games, low scoring boring basketball and all this with top 5 recruiting classes.
My responsibility as a coach was to improve every player every day, take advantages of my team strengths while exploiting my opponent’s weakness. There are things I consider essential for any program to be successful which is not being done at UK and the reason they have not reached a FF in 7 years.
I can’t say what goes on at a UK practice, but player development does not. All sports require proper form and fundamentals to excel which is learned through muscle-memory exercises. It usually requires a minimum of 1500 consistent repetitions to develop the proper form whether it would be shooting a basketball, swinging a bat, etc.
With the time and resources at UK how do you justify poor free throw percentage at the end of the year? We’ve already seen it most likely cost UK a couple of championships since Cal has been here. Why does Wheeler have poor shooting fundamentals after being in the program after 3 years? His shot is fundamentally flawed and he will never shoot a high percentage from 3 until it is corrected. There is no reason players have poor shooting unless you are not teaching proper fundamentals. It's 100% on the coach to install drills that improve each player based on their position which defines their role on the team. You won't have a guard working on what a center would be. All players whether in high school, college, or pro should improve weekly, monthly, and yearly with all aspects of their game with the proper coaching. I would hate to think Cal doesn't know therefore he can't teach it.
I can’t understand how senior players Toppin and Ware show very little improvement after being in the program for 4 years. Daimion Collins, McDonald’s All-American and extremely athletic, contributes very little in his second year. It’s a SHAME that fans bash players for their lack of development. We have seen this with many other players over the years but fans blame it on the player and that is sad (Brooks for example). I can assure you that every player would do whatever Cal asked.
I only joined to give a different view point and I’m not here to debate. Of course these are my opinions based on my experience. You won’t see me respond to other post on this site. To me it’s obvious what he is not teaching and although I’m a UK fan I do not think it’s the best choice for a player to attend that need to learn and improve their game.
For the sake of writing a book i will follow up with Part 2 in a few days.
