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By Troy Schulte/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF
Friday, November 27, 2009 9:22 AM CST
Tyree Glass hasn’t forgotten last season’s first game with Jackson State. It’s the final 55 seconds he remembers the most.
At the time, the Arkansas-Pine Bluff men’s basketball team was still in the hunt for a Southwestern Athletic Conference title. But an 87-83 loss to the Tigers at the Activity and Assembly Center in Jackson, Miss., a loss made it so the Golden Lions were looking up at the top two teams in the league the rest of the season.
Glass feels partly responsible for the loss. It was him who, while trailing 82-79, missed four free throws in a span of 11 seconds with less than a minute remaining. Twice the now-senior forward went to the free throw line with two shots to bring UAPB closer in a tight game.
First he missed twice with 55 seconds left, and again with 44.
0002000004D400000375 4CE,“I blew four free throws,” Glass said. “It hurt. But, you know, it’s something that you’ve got to let go. You’ve got to work on it.”
As UAPB prepares to play at Akron at 6 p.m. tonight, the Golden Lions have put early-season emphasis on making sure what happened to Glass nine months ago doesn’t happen again.
The Golden Lions (0-3) shot 61.8 percent from the free throw line last season, third-worst in the conference. Coach George Ivory feels that had the Golden Lions made a few more free throws they could have finished maybe second or third during the regular season, rather than fourth.
No team in the conference shot better from the free throw line than Jackson State last year (70.4 percent) and they finished second and advanced to the SWAC Tournament final.
“We talk about it a lot,” Ivory said. “They realize there were games where we had the lead and people caught up with us because we couldn’t close a game with free throws. They understand.”
Ivory cites the number of close games UAPB played last season when saying free throws meant so much for his team. UAPB’s seven losses came by an average of less than seven points and only once, a Jan. 17 overtime loss at Southern, did it lose by more than nine points.
0002000006FD00000843 6F7,A few more made free throws could have easily turned losses at home to Alabama State (five points), at Alabama State (six points), vs. Southern (four points), and at Prairie View A&M (two points) into wins.
“I feel if we would have made our free throws last year we probably would have come in first,” point guard Terrance Calvin said. “Had we made our free throws we would have won every (conference) game last year.”
So far this year, thanks to a renewed emphasis, UAPB seems to have improved in the category.
Through three games this season the Golden Lions are shooting 68 percent from the line, better than all but three teams in the SWAC. In a 70-52 loss to Texas-El Paso Nov. 18 they made 17 of 21 from the line, 81 percent.
Calvin made 5 of 6 while Glass made 4 of 4, Lebaron Weathers made 3 of 3 and Tavaris Washington made 4 of 6.
It’s a bit too early in the season to say that UAPB’s free throw problems are all fixed, but it’s about as good of a start as Ivory could have hoped for.
He credits the improvement to he and his coaching staff reminding his players of how close they were last year to being in the conference race a bit longer, and encouraging players to shoot a few more after practice.
Ivory has also taken to, in between shots, having his team run wind sprints so they get used to standing at the line when their legs and minds are tired.
The situation is hard to mimic exactly, though. One of the easiest shot in the game, all players will say, is much harder than it looks.
“It’s easy. It’s simple,” Calvin said. “But when you’re tired, it takes a toll on you. You just have to stay focused and make the shot.”
Said Glass: “It’s way harder. Everyone has their own opinion on what somebody should do in a game. But they don’t know the half (of it).”
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