Tuesday, February 16, 2010

The Wiggins experience

All I knew is I liked Fresno State Coach Adrian Wiggins based on what I knew of him and saw of him in last year's NCAA Tournament. He made a great impression at the post-game press conferences. But his stock has gone up with ESPN Graham Hays' piece today:

Yet if you stumbled into a Fresno State huddle at practice on any given day and expected to hear chalk talk, you'd be almost as likely to find Wiggins talking to his players about the minuscule number of African-American students enrolled in college in the United States in 1917, or sharing with a generation too young to remember even Don Mattingly's days in pinstripes the details of how Lou Gehrig seized an opportunity provided by Wally Pipp's headache.

Variously described as "sharing time" or "family time," it's all part of the Wiggins experience.

"It's our time to share," Wiggins explained. "And honestly, the big premise is there's more to life than basketball, and we say there's more to basketball than basketball. So it's a thought process, and it's about learning. And I believe with young people, if you take them outside of basketball and step into other parts of the world, you can touch their imagination and get their attention. So we spend time just talking about things outside of basketball."


The coach is a voracious reader? LOVE it.

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