COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Once USA Basketball trimmed to 18 finalists earlier this week, that’s when Arizona coach Tommy Lloyd really went to work.
For the first few days of the U19 training camp on the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Canter campus, Lloyd held group instructions and led huddles but also mostly watched scrimmages while 31 players went back and forth, guided by training camp coaches Damon Stoudamire (Georgia Tech), Mark Pope (Kentucky), Nate Oats (Alabama) and Hubert Davis (North Carolina).
But since camp has been down to 18, Lloyd has taken over, running halfcourt drills and stopping five-on-five segments whenever something needed to be fixed, as he does the rest of the year at Arizona.
“Roll your ass to the basket!” he told 7-4 Purdue center Daniel Jacobsen at one point. “Put pressure on the defense!”
Also as he does at Arizona: Lloyd mixed in plenty of praise at the same time.
“All in all, I’m really happy with the effort you guys are giving,” he said at the end of one practice. “You guys are a great group.”
Basically, it’s Tommy Lloyd being Tommy Lloyd. Just with a different logo on his red T-shirt, and a little more urgency.
After all, while Lloyd is allowed limited offseason work with the Wildcats plus six full weeks of practice before the regular season opens, with Team USA U19 he has just two weeks to build a cohesive group before the FIBA U19 World Cup opens on June 28.
“It’s very similar,” Lloyd said after a recent workout. “We have a little more time, obviously, on campus (at Arizona), but the framework of what we do and how we practice is very similar. Obviously, we want a lot of energy, a lot of repetitions, a lot of teaching, and giving the guys a lot of feedback.
“It’s fun. It’s fun being back out on the floor. It usually takes me a couple days to get my coaching legs under me, and I feel like I’m about there.”
It isn’t just the drills and scrimmages, either. While most of USA’s players have played against and sometimes even with each other on club-ball circuits or all-star showcases, they haven’t all been together before.
Arizona coach Tommy Lloyd talks to USA Basketball’s U19 players in training camp at Colorado Springs.
That makes chemistry another challenge that must be addressed quickly.
“You have to build a culture,” Lloyd said. “One of the big things with the player-coaching relationships, the player-player relationships, the coach-coach relationships in these quick-hitting things is that you have to come in with trust.
“You have to give your trust to others. You don’t have time to earn it. Because it’s literally a three week window. So we’ve been really talking a lot about that, and talking about celebrating each other’s successes.”
Meanwhile, Lloyd also has to work on players’ mindsets. He tells them to get off their feet between the twice-daily workouts and, also as he does at Arizona, likes to get them together in a different, fun setting.
With the Wildcats last season, it was a stopover in Oklahoma City to take in a Thunder game between playing Texas Tech and Oklahoma State. With the USA U18 team he coached last summer in the FIBA AmeriCup at Buenos Aires, he took them out several times to legendary Argentinian steakhouses.
This week, he’s even contemplated taking them to a Rockies-Diamondbacks game up the road at Coors Field.
“I usually try to find a way to get them outside of this facility because it’s a long haul for us,” Lloyd said. “We’re here for over 10 days, and it’s not vacation. You’re doing two-a-days, you’re doing film, and these guys are doing recovery, so it’s an around-the-clock deal.
With help from a coaching staff that includes Texas Tech’s Grant McCasland and Notre Dame’s Micah Shrewsberry, Lloyd built a unit that blitzed through the U18 AmeriCup last summer, winning all six games by an average of 42.7 points.
Those two assistant coaches but only four players from that team remain in this year’s U19 camp, while USA is mixing in six talented players from the U17 World Cup gold medalists, including incoming UA freshman Koa Peat and incoming BYU freshman AJ Dybantsa.
That means when the final 12-player team is expected to be announced Friday, it will contain no more than a third of players from Lloyd’s U18 team.
“It’s definitely a wide range of players,” Lloyd said. “What feels different is, I’m a lot more comfortable. It’s your second year in the role. You kind of know how these training camp works. You know the timing of things. You know the people around.
“But now you’ve got to get with the team, and part of developing a team is, putting in things through practice, trying things, making mistakes, making adjustments. You have to hit fast forward on all that stuff and make a lot of quick decisions. We’re kind of in the middle of all that right now.”
Arizona trainer Justin Kokoskie, who served in a similar role under Lloyd on USA’s U18 team last summer and is doing the same with the U19 group, said he still doesn’t know how Lloyd does it.
“He’s very well respected for how quickly and exceptionally he can build a culture and a chemistry that’s so challenging in a situation like this,” Kokoskie said. “But also we have a great group of kids this year. Obviously we still have to make some cuts and there’ll be some tough decisions, but quickly, these kids will gel. It’s fun to see.”
