PHILADELPHIA – With his team down by 28 with a little over 14 minutes left in the game, Gene Cross called a timeout to talk to his young Toledo team. He didn’t spend time drawing up a play – in fact, the clipboard at one point left the huddle. Instead, it was a teaching moment, a moment to challenge his team and about something larger than trying to win the game.
“It was more about us coming out and trying to show some maturity,” said the second-year head coach. “That’s kind of an oxymoron when it comes to this group, because we’re so young, but show some toughness. I’m trying to help our guys develop some mental toughness in order to get out there and perform and play through mistakes and play through when things don’t go your way.”
Indeed, to say the Rockets are young would be putting it mildly. There isn’t a senior on the roster, which features eight true freshman and a redshirt freshman in leading scorer Stephen Albrecht, to go with four sophomores. Forwards Justin Anyijong and Mouhamed Lo are the only juniors. For good measure, Albrecht has quite the baby face and doesn’t even look like he’s old enough to be in college.
Cross is running into something that is common in the second year of a coach’s tenure. He inherited a team with four seniors last year, but no juniors. Oftentimes, players who will transfer upon a coaching change tend to be those with more than one year of eligibility left since it’s often not worth it to sit out and play just one year at a new school. Although that didn’t happen at Toledo, Cross nonetheless has a roster with a lot of youth in his second year, and even his older players aren’t loaded with experience as only three entered the season having played more than 700 minutes in their career.
The Rockets certainly have some pieces. Anyijong has good length and remains a “potential” player, although his college career is getting to the point where he is what he is. Sophomore Larry Bastfield, a co-captain along with Anyijong, gives plenty of effort and had a promising freshman year last season. Albrecht has quickly made an impact, as has true freshman Jake Barnett, and both have shown that they can knock down the long range shot. Lo is now coming off the bench, while freshman Jordan Dressler and sophomore Ian Salter have shown that they can be contributors.
The Rockets came out of the Legends Classic sub-regional that Drexel hosted with three more losses, dropping to 0-6 on the season. That’s one of the tough parts of this, as losing is never easy and especially for a young team.
“A lot of things they are experiencing right now, they’ve never experienced before,” Cross said. “That’s part of the growth process. Unfortunately, it comes with wins and losses. We lost this round of games, but hopefully we can begin to develop a winning mentality as they grow and get older.”
Besides providing teaching moments for some of what winning at the college level takes, Cross also talked about how playing three games in three days, as they had to this weekend, is a grind. He told his team that this is what they can expect in March when the conference tournament comes, when a team has to win at least three games in three days and some need four wins in four days.
“If you want to be able to perform at a high level, you have to display a level of toughness that we didn’t display this weekend,” he added.
Additionally, he didn’t have to look far this weekend for some inspiration. It wasn’t all that long ago that Cornell, who also played in the sub-regional, was far from a given to win a lot of Ivy League games. No one would have imagined back-to-back Ivy League titles, including a perfect 14-0 mark two years ago, at that time. But as the Big Red grew up from being a young team, the wins started coming and the NCAA Tournament bids followed. Now there are plenty who feel that the Big Red could win a game in the NCAA Tournament.
A Chicago native who has spent much of his coaching career in the Midwest, Cross likes the school and the area. Last year, the Rockets led the MAC in attendance despite a 7-25 mark overall that included going 6-7 at home, so he knows what kind of interest and support there is among the fan base. He has recruited well in that region in his career, and many on his current team are from there.
Cross has been in a rebuilding effort before, as he joined Dave Leitao’s staff at DePaul and helped them rebound from two straight losing seasons to reach the postseason three straight years. So there’s no doubt that he knows what it takes to get a program going again, and that part of it is some patience in addition to players needing to adjust to a whole different ballgame physically and mentally.
Against that backdrop, it’s not surprising that he knows what can happen when a team like this sees losses add up.
“When you lose, you want to try to gain something from it. If you continue to lose, at some point as young men you start to question the method,” Cross said. “As long as we keep trying to reinforce that this is the formula, and we stay the course with what our formula is, then we’ll begin to see some success. We will, we just have to continue to grow and go back to the drawing board and keep getting older and more mature.”
There will probably be more teaching moments this season, although perhaps not quite like the one on Sunday or under the same conditions. That’s the nature of a young team, but the Rockets have some talent, so with some growth the wins won’t be far behind in due time.
