Lamont Paris knew he was getting a lot of depth and versatility when he essentially flipped the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball roster.
And he may have even more of both than he thought.
Seven new players are available to him this season, and all are officially on campus and have started summer workouts. The NCAA allows for four hours of individual workouts a week in the summer, and Paris and staff have taken full advantage of the time, getting the four incoming freshmen time to get acclimated to living away from home as well as learning drills the team works on during practice.
“This is a very important time for them,” Paris said this week. “It’s the one time they have basketball and nothing else. There’s no class now, so they can commit to basketball: eating, sleeping and developing themselves physically. That’s a critical time to lay the foundation for what that’s going to look like; then when you introduce classes, more time constraints and more distractions that they’ve got, you’ve created a foundation of what they want to be about.
“This is a very important time for all the guys, particularly the guys who have never lived away from home.”