The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Adams rebounds from ‘rough’ frosh season with a great summer
EAST HARTFORD — By his own admission, Brendan Adams’s freshman season at UConn was a struggle.
“It was obviously a rough season,” Adams said on Thursday, “anybody knows that.”
This summer was a lot better for Adams. In fact, the 6foot4, 200pound guard rose above all his teammates to win a “gold medal” in a heated, summerlong competition.
Each day throughout summer workouts, Husky players can earn points by winning different competitions — 1on1, 4on4, 5on5, sprints, work in the weight room, etc. It may sound like it’s all in good fun, but make no mistake: the competition was stiff.
“We were competing,” Adams recalled. “We were competing hard.”
Down the stretch, it appeared to be a twoman race to the finish line for first place between Adams and senior Christian Vital.
“We knew it was probably between us for probably the last two weeks of the summer,” Adams said. “The last two weeks we were competing, talking trash, all that.”
Adams wound up edging Vital by a halfpoint. Junior Tyler Polley finished third.
If you think Vital was satisfied taking the “silver,” just look at his facial expression in a picture posted on the UConn men’s basketball Twitter account on Aug. 16 that showed the three players on the medal “podium.”
Or, just ask Vital himself. “We don’t celebrate secondplace at UConn,” Vital said on Thursday, before he and his teammates signed autographs prior to the Husky football team’s seasonopener against Wagner at Rentschler Field.
It’s certainly a positive way for Adams to enter his sophomore season.
“I feel like I’m more mature as a person, and I feel like I’ve matured basketballwise, as well,” Adams said. “I feel I’m stronger, my body’s a lot stronger, so I should be good.”
It just never really clicked last season for Adams, the team’s lone scholarship freshman who had been recruited by Dan Hurley at URI and joined the coach when he took the UConn job. All season, Hurley kept insisting Adams was a terrific shooter, but the numbers suggested otherwise: 32.8percent
shooting from the floor, and just 21.9 percent (7for32) from 3point distance.
“In practice, everybody knew I was a shooter,” Adams noted. “Once it got to the game, I was in my own head a little too much, thinking about everything.”
There were some bright spots: 11 points in 23 minutes against Lafayette, nine points in 21 minutes against Wichita State. But for the most part, it was, as Adams
said ... a rough season.
“I look at it as a learning opportunity,” said Adams, whose older brother, Jaylen, played last season with the Atlanta Hawks and is now with Milwaukee. “Looking back at it, all I can do is learn from it and try to grow. Definitely some freshman jitters and all that, so just try to grow as I get older. I feel I should be better now.”
It appears he is. Just ask the man he turned into a disappointed silvermedalist a couple of weeks ago.
“Brendan had one of the best summers ... as you all saw, the best summer, by him winning the summer,” said Vital. “It was all about his confidence and him being confident, the same way he is in practice. Because in practice, he’s a different type of dude. He really shows who he is. I just want him to be aggressive and confident out there, and I’m sure he will.”
Already a proven hardworker this offseason, Adams is intent on showing fans that Hurley wasn’t kidding about his shooting ability ... and plenty of other things.
“I feel,” said Adams, “that I’m gonna show UConn fans a lot that I didn’t show last year.”
RIM RATTLINGS
Niels Lane, a 6foot5, Class of 2020 shooting guard out of Roselle Catholic in New Jersey, is slated to make an unofficial visit to UConn on Friday.