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[NCAA Championship]: Coaches ensure team is prepared

By Seth Fast Glass

April 2, 2006 9:00 p.m.

INDIANAPOLIS “”mdash; Failing to prepare is preparing to
fail.

But preparing accordingly in the NCAA Tournament also means
failing to sleep.

When the Bruins advanced to the Final Four, UCLA assistant coach
Kerry Keating was assigned to scout George Mason, and was up until
4 a.m. all of last week watching film on the Patriots. The week
before, Keating stayed up until the wee hours of the morning each
day analyzing possible Elite Eight opponent Bradley.

The Bruins didn’t play either team. And Keating
doesn’t expect the lost hours of sleep, of which he averages
3-4 hours per night, to be reimbursed any time soon.

“I had two weeks of preparation and got to do
nothing,” Keating said. “Not a lot of sleep
either.”

So if UCLA looks like it has been the better-prepared team for
most of the NCAA Tournament, it’s probably because the Bruins
have been.

Long after the players go to bed, UCLA’s assistant
coaches, Keating, Donny Daniels and Ernie Zeigler are in their
rooms clutching a remote control with one hand and usually a cup of
coffee with the other.

Because UCLA doesn’t know who its next opponent is in the
NCAA Tournament, each assistant coach is assigned a team the Bruins
could potentially meet. Keating was responsible for scouting
Belmont. Daniels watched tape of Alabama and Gonzaga. Zeigler was
assigned Florida, who UCLA will face today in the national
championship game.

After poring over film for four days, whichever assistant coach
was assigned the team the Bruins play next formulates a game plan
with Bruin coach Ben Howland and helps filter the endless hours of
film to present to the players.

According to senior Cedric Bozeman, it doesn’t seem the
filtering process cuts down on the time spent watching tape.

“We watch a lot of film. I don’t even know how much,
but it’s a lot,” said Bozeman, who said most of the
time watching tape is spent learning players’ tendencies and
favorite moves.

“You go to bed dreaming about film.”

That is, when the players get to bed. During the Pac-10
Tournament, which is played on consecutive days, the Bruins
didn’t know their opponent in the championship game until
after 11 p.m. the night before. When Cal finally outlasted Oregon
in double overtime, Howland called his players to the lobby and ran
drills in the team’s hotel ballroom to prepare for the Golden
Bears.

That work ethic has been maintained throughout the NCAA
Tournament, especially in UCLA’s dominant Final Four victory
over Louisiana State on Saturday.

“Luck is the result of hard work, so coach’s
mentality is we’re going to be prepared more than anyone else
is on the floor, both mentally and physically, and the players have
bought into that,” Keating said. Even when they’re not
more prepared, they still believe they are.”

Freshman Alfred Aboya certainly believes it.

“I think we out-prepared LSU,” Aboya said.
“They couldn’t run anything. We knew exactly what was
coming. It was kind of like a rehearsal for us.”

And for all the hours of lost sleep and caffeine intake that
ultimately don’t come to fruition for UCLA’s three
assistant coaches, they don’t seem to mind. When their
assigned team has been eliminated, they simply help the rest of the
staff in breaking down the actual next opponent. The only problem
they encounter is finding a use for the wealth of knowledge they
spent hours accumulating.

“I can tell you everything George Mason was going to do to
us,” Keating said. “Now I’ll probably never watch
Mason again unless we play them again.”

“You put so much time and effort into it, and then you
don’t use it,” Daniels said. “I mean you
don’t use it for anything.”

But according to Daniels, that still beats getting a good
night’s sleep in March and April.

“You want to eat, you don’t want to get
sleep,” Daniels said. “Coaches who are getting eight
hours sleep at this time of the year are not in the NCAA
Tournament.

“If you’re a coach and say you got a great
night’s sleep, sorry, you’re not in the
tournament.”

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Seth Fast Glass
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