Martin: ‘I didn’t come here to go on vacation’
Over the course of the season, coach Frank Martin has talked about the culture of the South Carolina basketball team. The first-year coach said in a press conference Wednesday that there must be a cultural change with “everyone involved in this basketball program.”
The Gamecocks haven’t won an NCAA tournament game since 1973, and they haven’t made the tournament since 2004.
That streak isn’t likely to end this year, with USC (13-14, 3-11 SEC) far from the NCAA tournament conversation as it prepares to take on Missouri tonight at 9 p.m. at Colonial Life Arena. The game will be nationally televised on ESPN2.
Martin says there hasn’t been a “true, unbelievable connection with the alumni base, the community and the product on the floor” since Eddie Fogler coached the Gamecocks from 1994-2001.
With recent losses in mind, Martin said he now understands why a sense of apathy surrounds the program, something he didn’t realize a year ago. To get the program back to where it was more than a decade ago, the coach says change starts with him.
“It starts with me doing my job,” Martin said. “Getting players to play the game the right way, and everything will start moving from there.”
The Gamecocks will have a big opportunity to move forward when they host Missouri (19-8, 8-6), a team in a position USC wants: fighting for a tournament bid.
USC visited Missouri earlier this season and nearly pulled off the upset. The Gamecocks had a 13-point lead early in the second half, and led by two with just more than two minutes to play. However, the Tigers pulled away in the last two minutes for a 71-65 victory.
Letting a late lead slip away has been a common theme for the Gamecocks this season, and it continued in their last game, an overtime loss at Georgia. In that game, USC held a three-point lead with 17 seconds left before UGA’s Kentavious Caldwell-Pope drilled a 3-pointer that stunned the Gamecocks.
Martin said he really doesn’t know what causes his team to falter in the closing minutes, but USC did everything backward in that game.
“I wish I could give you an answer,” Martin said. “All I can think of is the ol’ here-we-go-again syndrome. In the huddle between regulation and overtime, I was extremely displeased.”
Martin did say he was “proud of the resolve and the fight that our guys played with to put ourselves in a situation where we were there to win a road game against a good Georgia team.”
In addition, Martin hopes the narrow loss to the Tigers earlier in the season will give his team confidence in the rematch.
“The more you play somebody, the more confidence you should have in your ability to win,” Martin said. “We didn’t go in there the first time we played (Missouri) saying, ‘Oh my God, they’re real good.’ Our guys went in there and said, ‘You know what? We’re going to fight. We’re going to play the way we practice and attack these guys.’”
While the Gamecocks have struggled this season, Martin says he hopes he and his staff can look back three to five years from now and have a successful program like Martin’s former team, Kansas State, has right now.
However, Martin knew it wasn’t going to be an easy journey when he took the job.
“I didn’t come here to go on vacation,” Martin said.