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Message: [QUOTE="RF2044, post: 4207070, member: 40"] He's doing great -- soaking up some rays in Florida as we speak. Following up on that practice question brought up earlier -- my experience [from 100s of practices, including a handful at the Melo center] is that JB is almost always around. It's true, he delegates more of the warm up part of the practice to others, and lets the assistant coaches coordinate work with their positional groups, but he leads the main portions of practice. A typical practice starts with the players doing "extra" work before practice begins. So, some of the players will arrive early to get in extra shooting, or work on specific stuff -- either with the ACs or more commonly with the team managers. The coaches only have X amount of direct contact time per week they are allowed to have conduct practices, so they are diligent about following the NCAA rules [which is why the team managers help are the ones doing some of the peripheral extra stuff]. Some players will also be coming from class, and practices can be at different parts of the day, so you might have one or a few trickle in right as practice begins, depending on the day. Then, the players go through a body warmup and stretching, led by an athletic trainer. This might be the portion of practice some posters are referring to -- but honestly, there's not much for JB to do while they are stretching. I suppose sometimes he's in his office beforehand, but more commonly he's around -- sometimes talking to reporters from the PS, or having conversations with recruits and their parents, talking with prominent visitors [like ESPN announcers who might be in town and stop by], etc. while the athletic trainer puts the team through the paces. Then they usually do some form of drills to work up a sweat -- so full court running, UCLA drills, or competitive shooting [or some combination of all of the above]. Again, JB is there and observing, but the intent here is conditioning. Sometimes he intervenes, but he usually lets the ACs handle coordinating things while the team works up a lather. From there, they do positional work. Again, the ACs lead this segment of practice, but JB mingles / roams around, and sometimes gets more directly involved. When they begin working on structured offense, or scrimmaging, JB takes over and leads things from that point forward. But not all practices are the same. Early in the season, they might be doing more drills and position work. Once the games start, they're implementing game strategy and do more scrimmaging, so JB takes over practices earlier. But it is hard for me to envision him just sitting in his office and communicating to the team through an intercom, like Charlie from Charlie's Angels. He usually is around but not directly involved only at the beginning, when the players are doing the boring stuff. [/QUOTE]

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