“Focusing on academics”
(Written by kencraw)
The word on why Darian Hagan and Verran Tucker have not been at Spring Practice has been stated as, by me and others as “focusing on academics”. It’s what the coaching staff has been saying for why they’ve not been there.
To me, I internalized that as meaning it was a cooperative decision between the player and the coaches, perhaps even initiated by the player. I imagined a conversation that went something like this:
Coach: How are things going academically?
Player: I’ve been struggling with my (insert difficult class) class
Coach: How can I help
Player: I’m not sure, I’m just not finding time to do all of my work
Coach: Is your weight-lifting and practice taking too much time
Player: Well… I love going, but yeah, it takes a lot of time
Coach: Tell you what, you’re a strong player who’s going to start. Why don’t you take spring practice off to focus on academics
Player: Thanks coach
But Tedford when asked about it after Saturday’s scrimage (I think some were anticipating that Tucker and Hagan would at least participate in the weekend practices or perhaps even just the scrimages) Tedford’s wording of their status was a bit less chartable than the above theoretical conversation:
Yeah, they do academics when we’re at practice and then they come out at the end of practice and get their conditioning in.
Now, I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like a mutually agreed upon decision to help the player. That sounds a lot more like a disciplinary action to punish them for not being successful enough for the coaching staff to approve of. I’m most definitely reading between the lines here, but it just doesn’t feel like it’s a helping thing to me. It sounds more like they’re in trouble.
Hopefully it is not so much trouble that they might be academically ineligible at any point.
April 7th, 2009 at 8:26 am
Sounds to me like it’s to prevent them from being academically ineligible at any point.
April 7th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
To be honest with you Ken, I’ve never once thought of a scenario other than the latter. It seemed like a “Get your $%** together or else” type of scenario from the get go.
I’ve been hard pressed to find too many instances of a Cal player being academically ineligible, so I’m purely hoping that it’s all precautionary at this point.
April 7th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Dear Ken,
I knew you were a nice guy, but I didn’t think you were that optimistic. Isn’t the concept of an athletic scholarship based on the assumption that (in exchange for the free ride) the student will do well enough in school to participate in all athletic activities?
I always assumed that the coaches took Spring pretty seriously. They can’t be too happy when a student goofed around all Spring and now needs to work extra hard and miss practice.
April 8th, 2009 at 8:37 am
Well, perhaps I painted an more optimistic picture than I was really thinking with my theoretical diologue, but yeah, I tend to think the best of people. Really I guess I was just hopeful that the initiating party or the reason for it was better than a disciplinary situation. It’s one thing when a player realizes they’re in academic trouble, it’s another when the coach tells them they’re in so much academic trouble they’re being disciplined.
In either case, it’s obviously ugly and there is risk of academic ineligibility, but in one case you get the feeling the player cares and is trying and in the other scenario it a much worse situation.