Notes from Tom Crean’s press conference

  • 09/10/2008 10:46 pm in

Two of my favorite IU scribes, The Indiana Daily Student‘s Matt Dollinger and The Herald Times’ Chris Korman, were in attendance and taking diligent notes for Tom Crean’s press conference on Wednesday. I would suggest checking out both links, but here are a few of the more interesting points:

From Dollinger:

I asked Crean if he was trying to teach the Hoosiers his offensive system or if he was adapting his own system to IU’s players. Here’s what he had to say:

“I think coaches go one of two ways, you can recruit and plug guys into your system and that’s the system you’re going to run, or you can try and build a system around the talent you have. That’s what we’re trying to do this year. I don’t think there is anyway around that. Now, recruiting forward and moving forward… we tried to focus on some skill, versatility, length…we know what we want [the team] to look like down the road. Right now, did anybody think we’d have this small of a team? No. We’ve got to get ready to play more of a four-guard line-up.”

From Korman:

Crean says that he is still recruiting to the 2009 class. “It sounds cliche,” he said, “but you just have to do what’s best for the future of your program.”

Matt Roth has an injured shoulder and is not in workouts this week.

Crean would like to add two more walk ons through open tryouts.

The team had a 3.34 GPA for the summer. That pleases Crean.

Crean has a plan for Hoosier Hysteria (Midnight Madness). He wants to bring back as many former players as possible.

Crean’s been given a chance to look at Indiana’s response to the “failure to monitor” charge. He added a few things but thought, overall, that it was strong. He tried to pound home the same message he has since the middle of summer: the self-sanctions were extreme, and hurt the program severely as they were intended to do.

He said that the possibility of further NCAA sanctions is constantly brought up by competitors on the recruiting trail. He’s having to fight that with players and their parents.

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