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Spurs & Feathers: 'Our University has great fans': Exclusive with Frank Martin
Men's Basketball  . 

Spurs & Feathers: 'Our University has great fans': Exclusive with Frank Martin

Sept. 14, 2016

Spurs & Feathers executive editor Brian Hand recently sat down with South Carolina men’s basketball head coach Frank Martin to talk about a number of different topics.

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S&F: As you have talked about numerous times, it has been a different offseason for you with the Costa Rica foreign tour and the way you approached the tour. How has the tour allowed you to grow as a head coach?

When you deal with your players year-round and get to know them, you’re always with the basketball part of it. You’re always so consumed with fixing the problems that by disengaging you can sit back and watch and see the good.

I know coaching high school basketball in the summers every assistant would be in charge of one summer camp and one league, and I would go to all of the games, but I would sit in the stands. If there was a discipline issue, I would deal with it, but as far the basketball part of it, our assistants knew they system. They coached it, they knew the terminology and I was able to sit back and it would give me perspective as to the good that kids do. Not just what they have to get better at, and I think that is what this summer did for me.

You don’t get a gauge for what your players do in a 40-minute workout with four guys. You don’t get a gauge for ability to learn when you conduct workouts that last two hours a week. When you actually see them for 10 days for two to two and a half hours a day and what you spend two hours practicing on day one is expected to be able to be repeated on day two, you can get a sense for learning and what motivates who, who’s receptive and who is not, who understands and who does not, which then allows you to do your job a little better.

All of those things were what helped me tremendously as we go into the year.

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