Boston College Men's Basketball Ready To Prove Doubters Wrong
It is a new era in Chestnut Hill, as head coach Earl Grant continues to prepare for his first season with the Boston College Eagles men's basketball program. Coming in from the College of Charleston, Grant has a monumentally large task ahead of him, he has to turn around an Eagles program that has been near the bottom of the ACC for the better part of a decade. At ACC media days he talked the job ahead of him and trying to bring BC back to their glory days "(I am) fired up about the opportunity to be at Boston College, a big-time winning program that we've got four Sweet 16s, three or four Elite 8s. It's a big-time program. So we've got to get back to that."
Flanked by transfer guard Brevin Galloway, who he has known since he was a pre-teen, and Makai Ashton Langford, Grant talked about his plan to bring Boston College back to prominence in the ACC. "I know what they have to do to have a chance to be successful." he explained. "Just a blueprint to find success. But my goal for this year is to move the program forward. It's pretty simple. I don't have a lot of extravagant goals."
Moving the program forward will include incorporating a lot of new parts into the lineup. Gone are the likes of Jay Heath, CJ Felder and Steffon Mitchell, all whom have moved. But BC has also brought in transfers such as TJ Bickerstaff (Drexel) and Quenten Post (Mississippi State), along with true freshmen Gianni Thompson, Jaeden Zachery, Devin McGlockton and Kanye Jones. It will be up to the staff to incorporate them with returners such as the Langford brothers, Fred Scott, James Karnik and Justin Vanderbaan.
For Galloway and Ashton-Langford the connection to the new staff is a bond that is deeper than basketball. "I feel like a lot of the stuff that you'll learn from him is not really basketball," said Galloway. "It's more life in general. So I feel like that's what I'm going to take and try to implement in my life as I grow up and become a man."
As the season inches closer for Coach Grant and his players, they are excited to prove the doubters wrong. "Nobody really expects much out of BC. So that -- I feel like that makes us more hungry to actually prove people wrong in a way. And definitely you could definitely see it in the locker room," he explained. "Everybody on the team wants to change the atmosphere of Conte Forum."
The Eagles will kick off their season on November 9th against Dartmouth. Grant noted that a turnaround will take a few years, and he just needs to keep pushing the program forward. "Boston College is one of the best programs you can ask for in the world," he concluded. "So we can't take that lightly. We're just going to compete every day and we're going to have fun doing it. So very excited to be here. Very humbled by the opportunity."
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