LSU holds scrimmage, seeks intensity

• By GARY LANEY
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: Oct 28, 2009 - Page: 7C

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LSU’s weekend away from Baton Rouge was going well.

The men’s basketball practices at Louisiana College in Pineville over the weekend allowed the Tigers to, in guard Bo Spencer’s words, “start gelling.” They practiced together, roomed together in an area hotel, and had a weekend that was nothing but basketball.

So all in all, a weekend at the tiny Baptist college in a small town on the edge of a national forest was “good,” guard Alex Farrer said. “I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life there, but…”

But it was a productive weekend.

Until Sunday.

“I think everybody’s working extremely hard,” coach Trent Johnson said. “But Sunday morning wasn’t extremely good. … Actually it was pretty bad in terms of our intensity level, which is to be expected.”

Expected, but not necessarily acceptable for a team that has, in its coaches’ opinion, “no margin for error, at all,” because of inexperience and lack of depth.

“We have to compete with a sense of urgency,” Johnson said. “(Sunday) we took a step back. It’s OK to come out 11 days and be good but that 12th day is not OK if you are bad. And we were bad (Sunday).”

It’s all part of the growing pains of a young team that will have its first public exhibition today with a 7:15 p.m. scrimmage at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center. LSU team posters will be available with the players available for autographs from 6-7 p.m. The team will warm up at 7 p.m., then scrimmage for 20 minutes or more, an LSU news release said.

Admission is free.

“We’re going to be looking for combinations,” Johnson said. “We’re going to play. It’s going to be good for them. It’ll be the first time in front of fans, first time with officiating.”

Playing in game situations is important to his team’s development, Johnson said, because there simply isn’t a lot of college game experience on a team with only five lettermen back from last season, plus just two more players who have played in a Division I game.

“This time last year we were working on a lot of situations, really harping on defense, breaking down drills, so on and so forth,” Johnson said of last year’s Southeastern Conference champion that featured five seniors. “But this year, it’s a different approach.”