Joey Baker: Duke Has Had "Some Awesome Practices"
Junior Joey Baker gave an update on how Duke’s early workouts are going. The team is currently in an NCAA-defined transition period and can participate in strength and conditioning activities, sport-related meetings and skill instruction for up to 12 hours a week. Full practice begins on Oct. 14.
“Practice has been great,” he said. “We have a deep team. We obviously reloaded with a good freshman class. Those guys have been great. They bring it every day. They have enthusiasm. They compete. You match that with the returning players—myself, J-Gold (Jordan Goldwire), Wendell (Moore Jr.), Matt Hurt—it’s made for some awesome practices. We’re really excited to be able to officially start practice pretty soon here, then go on into the season. It’ll be a good year.”
Baker and the Blue Devils have similar goals to most Duke teams.
“The goal for us always here at Duke is to win a national championship,” he said. “That’s number one. That’s my number one personal goal as well. If we all gear toward that, everything else will take care of itself. The big thing as an older guy on the team now is kind of showing the way for younger guys now—stuff I’ve learned as a younger kid over the past two years, trying to help them out, making their life easier as they transition to play on this level.”
The Blue Devils had a longer than usual offseason to work on improving their individual games.
“All areas of my game needed improvement,” he said. “They still do. Definitely, I wanted to improve a lot being able to defensively stay on the court for long periods of time without fouling. That was a big focus over the quarantine time we had off.”
