Mike White and Gators Hoops Controlling What They Can in 2020
GAINESVILLE, Fla.— We have heard the word “unprecedented” a lot in 2020. However, it really does sum up the upcoming college basketball season, the college basketball schedule.
After a few miscues, the Florida men’s basketball team will finally tip off its season on Wednesday in “Bubbleville,” after the Gators had a few false starts.
Mike White’s men were meant to face off against UConn, UMass-Lowell, Virginia and Oklahoma – none of those happened due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. So instead of playing their third or fourth game of the year, they are playing their first.
“We certainly are going to have a ton of challenges this season, everyone in our sport,” White told reporters on Tuesday during a Zoom call. “We went from 31 games to a max of 27, that 27 already has taken a hit with a lot of teams.“
The schedule is already taking a hit and so are several team practice schedules.
All the Gators knew this past weekend was that they were going to play a game on Wednesday. Who were they playing? No one in Gainesville knew for sure.
“It’s crazy,” said White about finding out their season would start on Wednesday. “It was probably going to be this opponent but we aren’t quite sure. So we’re surfing the web and who else is up there and it could be this team or this team, so let's work on some other offensive stuff that they may be running as well.”
White says this level of uncertainty will be par for the course this season. Notre Dame head coach Mike Brey even took to Twitter to seek an opponent after their schedule was hit with cancellation.
“My personnel experience the last couple of weeks is you let it creep, the stuff you can’t control, and then you fight it off,” White said. “And you simply move on to next-play mentality like you’re in between the lines. What can we control? Let’s formulate the best practice plan that we can formulate, assuming that we’ve got this many because this is how many (trainer) Duke (Werner) says we’ve got today. It may change. If it changes, let’s meet again. Make some recruiting calls.”
Florida is in Connecticut to compete in the Basketball Hall of Fame Bubbleville. UF will start the season by facing off against Army – a team that has three games under its belt.
“Army’s really impressive with, believe it or not, their discipline, right,” said White. “They seem to be in incredible shape, they change ends of the floor really well, they execute really well, and they’re very unique offensively. They’ll play a style that I’m not sure we’ll see again the rest of the year, so that presents major challenges of course.
“Up-tempo.. I’m concerned about our wind, really, in these next two games. And obviously it’s the first game first, but a team that plays really fast, but offensively and defensively, plays a lot of guys, and I’m hopeful that we can match them in terms of our conditioning and our wind based on everything that we’ve been here the last couple weeks.”
Florida will be without junior college transfer forward Osayi Osifo in the game. He did not travel with the team since he is still in quarantine.
With all these uncertainties tossed in this season, White remains proud with his players’ focus.
“The positive there, is that… in this climate it calls for, and our guys have responded well to, an elevated level of focus because of all of the unknown,” he said. “It would be simplified, yet it may not lead to growth in other areas if we knew for one month exactly who we’re playing, when we’re playing, where we’re playing, and you focus on that one team. I’m sure we’re going to be rusty in a lot of areas. But we’re also probably also further advanced in maybe a couple areas we wouldn’t be based on the fact that there’s been so much uncertainty and we’ve had to prepare for so much.”
White hopes his Gators will continue to have this focus, as 2020 continues to throw some new obstacles in the team’s way.
“I don’t know how many games teams will get; I don’t know how many we’ll get. We just have to do the best we can, continue to prepare, continue to grow.
“We’ve just all got to just stay prepared and listen to the medical people, stay focused, have our priorities in line. We all say we want to play, we want to play, we want to play. We got to show that in action, by being ultra-careful and conservative and following all the guidelines that are given us by Duke Werner and all the medical people on our campus to give us the best chance.”
