LOBOS UNITED
UNM football player Blaise Fountain says the players are all in it together
Paul Weir doesn’t know for sure what, if anything different than the norm, he and his team will do for the national anthem when the season starts Nov. 11.
But he knew he’d be asked about it Wednesday at a news conference before the Lobos men’s basketball team held its first official practice of the season. He also knows whatever the team does, it will be together.
“I’m six weeks from our first game, so for me to sit here and say what we’re going to do or how we’re going to do it is very premature,” said Weir. A year ago, as head coach at New Mexico State, he brought in a black police officer and a black Marine to talk with his team before the Aggies, collectively, agreed they would stand for the anthem.
He plans to take a similar approach this season over the next six weeks. But he acknowledges it isn’t a subject he pretends to be an expert on, nor is it something he wants to make the decision on without his team taking part in some education on the matter. It is, after all, a fluid topic that has evolved even from one year ago when he first addressed it in Las Cruces.
“It’s a very moving, hot topic and the last thing I want to do is say something before I’ve been able to do enough of my own research and really spend time with our team to where in six weeks we have whatever plan we want to do,” Weir said. “The one thing I do know, I feel very strongly about, is I want to do it as a team. Whatever we’re going to do, we’re all doing together. There’s no division in that regard.”
The question was asked with a reporter prefacing it by referencing the UNM football team’s Saturday night game with Air Force in which five players knelt during the national anthem.
New UNM athletic director Eddie Nuñez told the Journal on
Wednesday evening none of those players intended to offend anyone and, moving forward with all teams, he will support all athletes with their right to do such demonstrations if they desire. But he wants all to do so with as much communication and awareness about all facets of the issue as possible.
“We’re educators,” Nuñez said. “We need to all work on educating them and ourselves on everything that goes into it and I want to put them (the student athletes) in a position to make their decisions with all factors considered.”
PRACTICE: There was no anthem played at the beginning of Wednesday’s practice.
But there was much anticipation as it was the first official practice of the season for UNM after a wild offseason of transition that Weir hopes will now start to settle down.
While the big-picture approach to changing the program was the focus up until last week (he stopped accepting speaking invitations last week and the team ended an intense sixweek offseason strength program on Friday), now Weir said the team is all about small goals.
“We’re going to really have to get into some finer details,” Weir said of what the focus is over the next six weeks before the Nov. 11 season opener. “We’ve put, I think, a really good foundation in place from a work ethic standpoint — from a workload standpoint. From a team camaraderie standpoint, I think it’s a really connected group of young men that will play really hard and have the endurance to play that way for 40 minutes.”
He declined several invitations from the media to comment on specific players’ progress to this point, saying it wasn’t appropriate for the program just yet to single any player out — good or bad — as practice is just now officially beginning. SCRIMMAGE TODAY: Today’s 4 p.m. scrimmage at Johnson Gym will be at least one half of full game simulation with two teams and officials, Weir said. After that, he isn’t sure how long the teams will go as depth and injuries become a concern.
It is being held at Johnson
Gym in an effort to re-engage with campus community.
“Hopefully our student body will feel connected as well — our campus will feel connected,” Weir said. “I’m hopeful it’s a start of an annual event that will kick off our season with the people on campus feeling a part of our team. We’ll kind of see where it goes in the future.”
BE OUR GUEST: After Wednesday’s practice, Weir was all smiles. It wasn’t so much about the practice itself as the inspirational message from pre-practice guest speaker Clifton Taulbert, the award winning author and speaker.
“One to 10, how good was Taulbert before practice?” Weir asked senior guard Antino Jackson while talking to a reporter.
“He was a 10. Easy,” Jackson told the reporter.
Taulbert, maybe best known for books Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored, is in town for a speaking engagement at Central New Mexico Community College. Weir saw a flier for that event while at a speaking engagement of his own last week at a local Rotary club and later heard about Taulbert’s visit again at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon.
“I found out he was going to be here and just asked Debbie Johnson (on the Chamber’s Board and also the director of the Office of Education Entrepreneurship & Economic Development at CNM) if there was any way we could get him to talk to the team,” Weir said. “It worked out and he was tremendous.”