FRESHMAN ORIENTATION
Past initial doubts, new Lobos know they belong
Newcomers are getting over the shock of adjusting to Lobos’ system
Drue Drinnon can admit it now. It wasn’t always a great summer for the Lobos’ 6-foot freshman point guard from Georgia, one of two freshmen scholarship players on this year’s roster.
The crash course in Division I basketball, and the extreme conditioning drills demanded by head coach Paul Weir, took a toll in June on Drinnon and fellow freshman Tavian Percy, the 6-6 wing from Miami who played his senior season of high school basketball in California.
“For a minute there, I was having a hard time just trying to — I don’t know,” Drinnon said Tuesday before practice. “I was having a lot of doubts. But I got through it. Coaches talked with me. My parents talked with me. I got past that.”
The learning curve took about a month, Drinnon recalls. The combination of adjusting to the elevation, the speed of the game at the college level, playing against a roster full of highly skilled, much bigger players made the freshman question whether he’d have a role on this season’s team.
Those doubts, from both Drinnon and Percy, were not unexpected by Weir. In fact, he knows all newcomers, but especially freshmen, have such moments when adjusting to a higher level of work and competition.
“We warned them both before they got here what this was going to be like,” Weir said. “I called Drue, I called his family, even before he came out just saying, ‘Look. This is going to be really, really hard. If you’re coming out with really high expectations and you’re going to be disappointed if you don’t meet those, don’t get on the plane.’
“I told him and his dad that, to the point where I think they thought I was trying to unrecruit him. I was just being very up front. I said, look. I don’t want someone transfer-
ring in January. I don’t want someone walking into my office in April saying this isn’t what they wanted. I told them on the front end, this is a veteran team with a lot of older guys and it will be hard for you.”
By Tuesday, when both Percy and Drinnon each had one of their best practices yet as Lobos on a day when others struggled to get going, both knew they belonged. And both say there’s no reason to think they won’t be key parts of this year’s roster.
“A lot of players think that just because they’re freshmen or they’re young, they think that they have to sit or they have to step back,” Percy said. “But, no. I think I have to come in and do whatever it takes to help my team win and I’m not going to have that as an excuse that I’m a freshman and I’m not supposed to do those things.”
Drinnon added that getting through those initial doubts was made easier knowing he had a fellow freshman like Percy there with him.
“We’d have meetings over the summer with coaches talking about everything and then come (home) after those meetings and talk to each other,” Drinnon said. “Everything they were telling me, they were telling him, too. So we knew it wasn’t just us. We knew what we both had to do to get better. We had to work. And we have.”
NOT AVAILABLE: The Lobos held a prepractice media day session with almost all players made available to area media outlets. The three players not made available were Carlton Bragg, who has still not been added to the team roster but is on the team and on scholarship and will be eligible to start playing in mid-December, junior college transfer point guard Keith McGee and Towson transfer Zane Martin.
Bragg has not been made available to media yet this year, though he has been with the team and enrolled at UNM since January. The team has not yet heard from the NCAA if its waiver requesting he be allowed to play in the Nov. 6 opener has been granted.
McGee and Martin were not allowed at practice Tuesday after showing up late to a team function over the weekend. Neither were at the Rudy Davalos practice facility Tuesday for the media session or any part of practice.
SNAKE: Well-known Lobo fan Mark “Snake” Tichenor was on hand for Tuesday’s practice. He has an open invitation from Weir to attend any practice and even joins the team in its post-practice huddles.
Snake had a white mask on at Tuesday’s practice, a red fedora he said was given to him by friend and late UNM booster Turner Branch and was wearing the cherry red blazer with an embroidered turquoise UNM insignia on the chest given to him by the late Bob King, the former Lobos coach whose name adorns the court in Dreamstyle Arena — the Pit.
SPECIAL GUEST: Former Mountain West Coach of the Year Dick Hunsaker, who was the interim coach at Utah in the 2000-01 season and won the league honor after Rick Majerus stepped down to take a personal leave, was on hand at Tuesday’s practice and evaluating how the Lobos run their practices.
Hunsaker, who retired in 2015 after 13 seasons as Utah Valley’s head coach, will be one of the guest speakers at Saturday’s Lobos coaching clinic and will also be around the team all week giving Weir feedback on how the coaching staff runs practices, drills, film sessions, etc.