North by Northwestern

Bill Carmody has ushered in a new era of expectations surrounding the Northwestern men’s basketball program. After earning three consecutive postseason appearances (in the NIT) prior to last season, the team followed up by getting closer to its first NCAA Tournament than ever before, only to fall agonizingly short due to an abundance of losses in close games. Now without the school’s all-time leading scorer in forward John Shurna, Carmody is looking to finally make the breakthrough that has alluded him in his previous 12 seasons as Northwestern’s head coach.

North by Northwestern sat down with Carmody at Big Ten Media Day to get his thoughts on transitioning from last season’s heartbreak to a roster with a lot of fresh faces.

You have said that it’s the whole university, not just the basketball program, that has committed to winning – that it has been from the top down. Your string of consecutive post season appearances have coincided with the arrival of both President Morton Schapiro and Athletic Director Jim Phillips. Has that contributed to your recent success?

I think that’s part of it. There are different components to it. The marketing has helped. They’ve infused some money into billboards and “Chicago’s Big Ten Team,” just raising people’s awareness that you can be a really good athlete and go to Northwestern.

When you recruited John Shurna, there is no way you could have known what he would become. Is it tough to identify those players that are going to work as hard to get to that point?

A lot of recruiting is upside, not just how good a player is now. You just as soon get a guy who’s great right now. But different years when you’re recruiting you can say, “OK, we’re going to be good at that spot for another two years, so let’s get a guy we’ll take a chance on who might be not be able to do this or that.” But we can work with him and bring him into the fold. Recruiting is simple but there are some aspects of it that you have to consider. You don’t always have complete control over it because of transfers and all that.

One of those guys who has exceeded expectations is Reggie Hearn, who said he has gone back and watched on DVR all those close losses from last season. Is that something you coaches have stressed for the players to do?

I haven’t stressed it but I know guys do it and I think that’s good. We’ll bring out what we think are the key points to that – what we can do differently in these last-second situations and what mistakes we made. We talked about them right after too, obviously, but [we’ll do it again] with more of a positive look.

Have you identified a couple overarching themes in those losses or was it just different individual factors based on the specifics of those games?

I’ve said this before, I just think you just need a guy who can beat somebody off the dribble. That helps. I don’t think we had that. [Tre] Demps might be that kind of guy now. And now you have a center you can throw the ball in to and he’ll be able to score down there. He’s not double-teamed. He can score and we haven’t had that. There’s different ways to go about it but I think beating guys off the bounce is the best way. We’ll be working on that.

You’ve got so many freshman coming in, in addition to new faces like Jared Swopshire. It would seem like a huge motivating factor for the guys coming back was being so close last year. How can you express that same emotion to the new players on the team?

Well, they all know. So it’ll be expressed but the freshman all came here and followed every game. They signed [letters of intent], they came [to games] and they knew [about the team]. We’re trying to improve on everything and integrate the new guys with the older guys. And then we move onto the specifics: rebounding, interior defense, along with last second situations. So that’s a lot.