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Jeff Blake/jblake@thestate.com/
USC head coach Darrin Horn
GoGamecocks.com
Morris: Believing instills confidence in Horn's squad
Posted on 02.03.09
THERE IS SOMETHING special happening at the corner of Greene and Lincoln streets in downtown Columbia. It has everything to do with a first-year coach instilling a high level of confidence in his team.
Darrin Horn is the coach. Members of the South Carolina men’s basketball team are the ones walking with an extra bounce in their step these days. Call it a swagger, because USC sits atop the SEC Eastern Division standings, tied with Florida and Kentucky as we near the halfway point of the league season.
“It’s a big part of it,” Horn said Monday of the role USC’s ever-increasing confidence has played in its success. Horn, who insists he alone is his team’s shrink, then turned psychologist for a minute.
“A lot of things change when you think you can,” he said.
USC believes it can. It believes it can win any game on its schedule. It believes it can win every game decided in the final seconds. It believes it can win the SEC East. It believes it can play in the NCAA tournament. It believes.
So how, exactly, did Horn get his team to the point where it can beat 19th-ranked Baylor on a last-seconds drive to the basket by Zam Fredrick, stun then-No. 24 Florida with a Mike Holmes-to-Fredrick fly pattern as time expired, and win at then-No. 24 Kentucky on a final-seconds shot by Devan Downey?
“Growing is not only thinking that you can,” Horn said, “but understanding what it takes to get you to that position.”
What it took for Fredrick, Downey, Holmes, Dominique Archie, Sam Muldrow and the rest of this band of believers to get to this point was a total buy-in to Horn’s way. It started during what the players now refer to as “boot camp” this fall and continues every day during the team’s grueling practices.
Although he has no military background, there is a military line of thinking to the way Horn has gotten each player and his entire team to perform with confidence. He broke down his team to build it back up.
Horn said he recognized early that his team lacked confidence. More importantly, the players lacked trust in one another. So he systematically went about building both.
The fall boot camp required every player to complete specific drills in a certain time. If any player fell short, the entire team was required to repeat the drills.
“That’s what the system is designed to do: create a good work ethic,” Horn said. “That comes from a great work ethic in practice, and that comes back to day one, doing what we ask them do.
“It wasn’t always easy. They didn’t always like it. They may not have always been sure it would work, but they did it. Now they’re starting to see some roots in that, not just in winning, but in how they’re playing and the position they’re putting themselves in.”
The players learned early that there is no corner-cutting with Horn. He stopped one of the team’s first full-squad practices in the middle of a passing and shooting drill. Players were cheating away from the sideline hash marks in order to shorten the distance they had to run between stations.
Horn’s message was clear ... and loud!
“If you cheat in practice, you’re going to cheat in a game!” Horn screamed at his players. “If you cheat in a drill like this, you’re going to cheat in the classroom! You’re going to cheat in everything! Now start on the hash mark!”
Another time, while the coaches were away, the team eased through several running drills. That afternoon, Horn scrapped his practice plan. Instead, the team ran approximately 50 “22s,” a drill in which a player is required to twice run baseline to baseline and back in less than 22 seconds.
Videotape study also has been a tool to help boost team confidence.
“Hey, guys, it was close but we won by this much or we lost by this much,” Horn recalled telling his team. “Look what it could have been had we controlled the things we control. That’s not on anybody. That’s on us sprinting back on defense. That’s on us blocking out (for rebounds). Little things like that.”
Little things like playing as hard as a team can play for the entire 40 minutes of a game. Horn demands that effort, particularly on the defensive end, where it applies pressure on the ball, denies passes on the wings and bodies up against opposing post players.
“It’s creating a mind-set of habits that we’re going to do what we’re supposed to do,” Horn said. “We’re going to do the right thing.”
So it was no surprise late in USC’s win on Saturday at Kentucky that Fredrick screamed at his teammates that the Wildcats were tired, that the Gamecocks had worn the opposition down, that the best-conditioned team was going to win. That the best team was going to win.
Neither was it a surprise that when Horn gathered his team during a timeout with 22.2 seconds remaining and Kentucky leading by one that every player looked their coach square in the eye when he declared “we’re going to win this game.”
Every one of them believed him.
Listen to Morris Tuesdays from 4-5 p.m. on ESPN Radio 93.1 FM
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