Winthrop scout team doesn’t hold back during Tuesday practice

At a time when Winthrop men’s basketball is mired in its first negative stretch of the season - consecutive conference losses can make the college basketball player or coach’s world feel like its crumbling down around them - the Eagles’ scout team certainly didn’t make the regular contributors’ Tuesday practice any easier.

Anders Broman - the all-time leading scorer in Minnesota high school basketball history and a guy who pumped in 70 points multiple times in high school - got hot from 3-point range. Freddy Poole - the former Dutch Fork High football defensive end - danced around the paint, scoring buckets and blocking shots. And Kellen Blake, Mitch Hill and Hunter Sadlon all took turns torturing their Winthrop teammates Tuesday during a practice that the scout team won.

“We would never take it easy,” said Sadlon, a junior guard who is the scout team’s unabashed leader. “We always want to go 100 percent full force all the time.”

At one point during a full-court portion of the practice, Blake intercepted a pass, pitched ahead to Broman, who dumped off to Hill for the slam. As Blake smiled, assistant coach Marty McGillan encouraged him – and the rest of the black shirts – “don’t take your foot off the gas.”

Broman – sitting out this year after transferring from South Dakota State – then canned a deep 3 over a defender.

“Why’s he keep getting rhythm shots?” an exasperated coach Pat Kelsey queried the starters.

“It’s tough not being able to play in games,” said Broman, who came to Winthrop to join his younger brother, freshman Bjorn. “Practice is my games now, so I’m going as hard as I can trying to show the coaches what I can do. It’s fun to be on the scout team; you get to launch them and you don’t get yelled at as much.”

Broman was rare in that regard the last few days.

Kelsey didn’t hold back on a team that suddenly finds itself in the middle of the Big South pack after winning its first two league games back in December. The Eagles (9-5, 2-2 Big South) have an even tougher game Wednesday night at UNC Asheville (10-5, 3-0), which has won eight of its last nine games.

While recognizing there is a lot of basketball left, Winthrop’s players and coaches are feeling the heat to reverse the results. Even still, the black-shirted scout teamers showed no mercy on Tuesday.

“When you’re going as hard as you can, you’re making them better,” said Broman.

Hill’s transition slam was the kind of play the scout team lives for. It’s the kind of play the 6-foot-7 walk-on’s family - ever-present at Winthrop home games even though they live in Ohio - would have gone nuts over in an actual game.

“We pride ourselves on being selfless and that one play included all three guys that were running and I was trailing,” Sadlon said. “We don’t care who scores, who gets the credit, as long as it’s consistency, making shots, taking good shots, passing the ball and moving it, for us it’s a big energy lifter.”

Even better was playing in an actual game, even if that almost always means there is a blowout one way or another.

With Winthrop trailing Coastal Carolina last Saturday by 19 points with about 7 minutes left, Kelsey put in Hill, Poole and Sadlon. Blake came in later and all four played at least four of the final minutes. Winthrop and Coastal finished in a 14-14 tie during that stretch.

“That was a huge moment for us to come in and execute and move the ball and just do what we’re supposed to do,” said Sadlon, who spurned Division I baseball scholarships to be a preferred walk-on at Winthrop.

“I’m gonna play the guys that compete and play the hardest,” said Kelsey, who was a scout team player at Xavier that eventually earned a scholarship. “I don’t care who it is.”

Sadlon pointed out that he had zero turnovers in his four minutes on the floor against Coastal, a reminder that scout team guys aren’t just there to make up the numbers in practice. They aspire too.

“I’m gonna never stop trying to get my opportunities to play in games,” he said. “I want to play like everybody else does.”

Defense the difference between Asheville and Winthrop

Probably the biggest difference between UNC Asheville and Winthrop right now is defense.

The Bulldogs got longer with the offseason addition of two 6-foot-5 freshmen on the perimeter, but that can’t account for how much better Nic McDevitt’s team has become on the defensive end. Statistically, Asheville has its best defensive team since the 2011 Eddie Biedenbach-coached group that won the Big South and an NCAA tournament play-in game.

Asheville has only allowed six of its 15 opponents to average more than a point per possession, an excellent rate. Consider that Winthrop has held just three of its 14 opponents under that mark and the difference is stark.

Winthrop’s defensive struggles have been well documented and they’re exacerbated when the Eagles don’t shoot well. In the losses to Campbell and Coastal Carolina, Winthrop made 13-of-50 3-pointers and just 23-of-44 free throws. It wasn’t surprising that large portions of Tuesday’s practice were spent on shooting from those two areas of the floor.

“We’re not where we need to be right now,” Kelsey said after Monday’s practice. “We’ve had some games and some periods throughout the season where things were clicking and things were rolling, and the fact of the matter is they’re not right now. How you change that is you get better in practice.”

Monday’s two and a half-hour practice at the Coliseum was positive; players seemed annoyed with the performances of the past week and a bit more accountable. Tuesday’s practice was just as long and tense, but it ended on a lighter note when the players recorded a group sing-along of the Frozen hit “Let It Go.” The video will be played on Jan. 16 when the Eagles host Liberty on “Frozen Day.”

This story was originally published January 5, 2016 at 5:20 PM with the headline "Winthrop scout team doesn’t hold back during Tuesday practice."