K-State's Jerome Tang Has A Plan In Place To Mesh 10 New Faces This Season
On the surface, Kansas State men’s basketball coach Jerome Tang and his staff have plenty of work ahead of them to get 10 new players to mesh as a cohesive unit by the time the season starts.
The plan already in place is nothing new for Tang. It’s something he implements every year.
It’s about the heart.
“For us as a staff, we always talk about heart connection,” Tang said Friday morning in a Zoom interview with the media. “It is our job to connect with our players’ hearts. When you can connect with their heart, you get them to understand or at least you understand where they are coming from to help them to get to where they want to get to.”
And the Wildcats want to ascend beyond where Tang took them in his first season, which was the Elite Eight.
You can definitely count 6-foot-10 forward Coleman Hawkins, a transfer from Illinois, in that category. Last season Illinois reached the Elite Eight before losing to eventual national champions, UConn.
While K-State had a winning season in Tang’s second year at K-State, he expects more than an appearance in the NIT.
Changes were made that should cause the K-State fan base to bubble with excitement. Besides landing Hawkins, who many college basketball pundits consider the prize catch in the transfer portal, K-State also brought in center Ugonna Onyenso from Kentucky, forward Achor Achor from Samford and guard Dug McDaniel from Michigan.
Joining the nine transfers is incoming freshman guard David Castillo, a top-50 high school prospect.
So yes, that’s a lot of pieces that are not connected just yet into a beautiful picture. However, Tang said the team iwill be ahead of where his first two teams at K-State were at in terms of team building.
“I am excited,” he said. “We haven’t been able to do this the last two years because we spent the whole summer still recruiting a team. You couldn’t fully focus on meshing and doing team building things because you were waiting until all the guys were here. Well, by July 7, we will have every guy on campus, Lord willing, and then we will be able to do team building things and get a chance to see them all interact with each other.”
It will be easy for the players to build team chemistry in early July when they arrive on campus. They will all live in the same apartment complex, which is a 30-second walk to the gym.
“They are all going to be there and that is going to help foster that team chemistry we want and for us to identify things we need to work on in order to build that type of chemistry,” Tang said.
David Boyce is a contributing writer to K-State On SI. He can be reached at davidboyce95@gmail.com.
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DAVID BOYCE