Fresno State basketball: Familiarity in place for Wainwright, Bulldogs at start of individual workouts

Jerry Wainwright wore a white Fresno State shirt on his first day back in the central San Joaquin Valley, a holdover from his first stint on the Bulldogs bench with coach Rodney Terry.

And on his second day, Tuesday, there had to be a familiarity to just about everything as well, from the returning players, to the offices, to the North Gym, to his coaching — which is the reason the first and only call that Terry made after Michael Schwartz left to take a position at Tulsa was to his mentor and friend.

“I saw Coach at the Final Four and I knew he had an itch,” Terry said of Wainwright, who was at Marquette as an assistant from 2012-14. “He has a wealth of experience. Coach knows what it takes to win at this level.”

If there is a difference at Fresno State, it is in the expectations, which were muted then and are much higher now with returning all-conference guard Marvelle Harris, Cezar Guerrero and Julien Lewis all entering their senior seasons.

Wainwright, in his year off from coaching, stayed in touch with the game and had a chance to get to know the Bulldogs, seeing them at their extremes.

He was in Florida in November when they dropped three games at the Gulf Coast Showcase, and spent a week with the team in Fresno later in the season when they were playing better basketball.

“It took a while to pick up pieces — injuries, everything was so out of sorts and you could tell,” said Wainwright, a former head coach at DePaul, Richmond and UNC-Wilmington.

The Bulldogs started individual workouts Tuesday with Harris and the returning players minus forward Eugene Artison, a redshirt last season as a freshman who has decided to transfer back to junior college at the College of Southern Idaho.

There is a lot to do, but Wainwright might help most in fitting the pieces together, an area that the Bulldogs had some difficulties with last season with injuries and ineligibility when going 15-17 but 10-8 in the Mountain West.

“The hardest thing to do in basketball is to teach and build team over the human nature of self, especially in today’s times where there’s an incredible number of outside voices,” Wainwright said. “But I think we have the makings here of really good leadership. I really like the kids. I like how they carry themselves. I like their smiles.

“I think the next step for everybody is to really pull together. Basketball is interesting because the hard screen, the extra pass, the 50-50 ball, those are the difference. Making plays. That comes out of unselfish play. It all sounds easy, but that’s the toughest part of this business. But I’d like to think that I understand that. I carry it. I know it works and I’ll be the persistent, hard-headed, gray-haired old man preaching it because there is no other way to win. You cannot win any other way.”

The Bulldogs will get an opportunity to work on that this summer in playing three games abroad — they leave for Italy on Aug. 6 — and have a favorable schedule with 18 home games for the first time since 2006-07 to make more of an impression on the Mountain West. The Bulldogs’ 10 conference victories last season were their most since 2006-07 when going 10-6 in the Western Athletic Conference.

“I hope I can maybe help get a little more horsepower, polish a couple of dents out,” Wainwright said. “I’m not here to reinvent the wheel, but try to bring out the best in everyone. I think the greatest thing you can give to anyone in life is confidence. Some of these guys are really hard on themselves. They don’t go from play to play. That’s confidence. ...

“I’ve always prided myself on talking to every kid every day and everyone of them has a button that, if we can find it, will help them improve.”

MW TOURNAMENT

All-session tickets for the 2016 Mountain West Conference Tournament at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas are on sale through member institution box offices.

The conference on Tuesday announced the format for the tournament — the women will start with three first-round games March 7, with the quarterfinals March 8, the semifinals March 9 and the title game March 11.

The men open with the first round March 9, the quarterfinals March 10, the semifinals March 11 and the championship March 12.

This story was originally published June 30, 2015 at 8:39 PM with the headline "Fresno State basketball: Familiarity in place for Wainwright, Bulldogs at start of individual workouts."