To quote the not-so-distant popular culture past, it’s a pretty well known fact that Rule Number 76 is, “No excuses, play like a champion.”
And so it’s only fitting that in only its third game-a 66-60 loss to Rider University-the Boston University men’s basketball team, specifically freshman guard Corey Lowe, has brought that now-famous axiom into the spotlight.
“I really don’t want to use the excuse that we’re a young team anymore, because we’ve all had a few games, so we should be used to it,” he said. “I think we just didn’t execute down the stretch and that starts with me playing the point. We just made a few mistakes down the stretch that hurt us.”
It is a somewhat surprising, but quite welcome, statement.
On a team that most certainly could have chalked its most recent loss up to youthful inexperience, it didn’t. After all, things like hustling and finishing plays remain the same no matter what level you’re competing at.
“With leads, without leads, we didn’t really execute the way we had talked about executing,” said BU coach Dennis Wolff. “Some of it I attribute to the youth of the team, but some of it is that it’s still basketball that they’ve all played before and they need to make better decisions. I don’t think we competed at crunch time when we needed to, to come up with balls at their end so that’s what happens and you end up losing.”
After BU’s first win of the season over Harvard University, sophomore Tyler Morris hinted at dropping the “young team” persona as well, saying that if you watched the Terriers that night you know they “certainly don’t play young.”
If the entire team buys into the idea that being young has become a virtual non-factor so early into the Terriers’ season, BU will need to make performances such as the one Saturday a rare occurrence.
“A lot of it was us,” Wolff said. “We didn’t cut as hard as we did in the other two games and we weren’t as alive as we were in the other two games.”
Naturally, any team in the country is going have days where it’s not as sharp as it would like to be. However, reducing the number of those days, while throwing out the excuse of being a young team, is a daunting task.
“I didn’t think that we were nearly as sharp as we were at other times. Some of it is a carry-over from practice yesterday and that’s what I just told the guys,” Wolff said. “Some of this you’ll have with a youthful team and now this is where we’re at. This is the reality-that there’s gonna be ups and downs and we can play way better than we played for a longer period of time and we just didn’t do it today.”
Senior co-captain Omari Peterkin also touched upon poor practice when assessing BU’s disappointing loss.
“We didn’t have a good practice [Friday] and when we have good practices we usually do good going into games,” Peterkin said. “We need to start having more consistent and better practices when we’re going into games-I feel that’s a big part of it.”
Wolff agreed.
“What we’re preaching to these guys right now is that you can not just come at 1 p.m. the day of the game in Division I,” Wolff said. “You start the day before, you start the morning of-it all runs together. Any good players we’ve ever had here prepare the right way. We need to make sure they understand that.”
Definitely a mentality that goes for every player on the team, but particularly the younger players-even if they don’t play like it.
“Even though we have a lot of young guys, it’s a learning process for them, but I feel that as an older guy I think that Brian [Macon] and I need to lead,” Peterkin said.
Maybe it was simply a sloppy game, lack of execution down the stretch, or perhaps Rider was a lot tougher than BU expected, but whatever BU’s reason for dropping Saturday’s contest is, it certainly isn’t inexperience. Lowe and company want to play like a champion.