By Roscoe Nance
Kenny Blakeney will begin his head coaching career in the double bonus thanks to the Howard men’s basketball team’s three-game tour of Spain on Aug. 9-18.
The tour should give Blakeney and the Bison a leg up on adapting to a new system and an opportunity to develop chemistry. It will also allow Blakeney, who has often talked to his wife about traveling to Spain, to cross an entry off his bucket list.
“Going to Spain has been something that was on my bucket list, but I haven’t had a chance to do,” Blakeney, 47, said. “From my perspective, it fulfills something that I’ve been wanting to do. For our players, it should be even more of an experience. How often does a student-athlete get an opportunity to go to Spain and visit cities like Barcelona and Valencia? That’s pretty big time.”
Blakeney has been a college coach for 24 years as an assistant at James Madison, La Salle, Delaware, Seton Hall, Marshall, Harvard and Columbia. He played five years at Duke, where he part of two national championship squads and was a team captain his senior season.
However, this will be his first international tour with a university team. Blakeney was, however, a member of an ACC All-Star squad that consisted of one student-athlete from each conference member squad that toured Canada. The All-Stars spent two weeks in Canada and played six games against teams from a Canadian summer pro league and the Canadian National Team that featured a young Steve Nash, who went on to be a two-time NBA MVP
“It gave us a great opportunity against professionals at a high level and a national team,” Blakeney said. “It also created an opportunity for great cultural and educational experiences and to develop lifelong friendships.”
He envisions the same type of experience for the Bison in Spain.
Howard’s opponents are to be determined. Between games, the Bison will take in the sights and sounds of Barcelona and Valencia. They will tour Camp Nou Stadium, home of the world renowned FC Barcelona soccer team, take a bike tour through Barcelona and cruise on the Mediterranean Sea.
Howard will wrap up its stay with a pair of games and a tour of the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, a large unfinished Roman Catholic church in Barcelona, built in 1882.
Midway through the tour, the squad will journey to Valencia, a city is known for its arts and sciences with futuristic structures including a planetarium, an oceanarium and an interactive museum.
“This will be a great experience for the guys,” Blakeney said. “No one (on the team) has ever been to Spain. It’s a great cultural and experience for our guys; we get to represent Howard on a world stage and expose the Howard brand to a country of people who might not be familiar with Howard.”
From a basketball perspective, the tour provides the Bison an opportunity to bond and develop chemistry on and off the court. That’s an intangible that could pay huge dividends, particularly since the roster is stocked with young players who have little college experience.
“We’re going to be in a foreign country and in an area where I don’t know how many guys on the team are fluent in the language,” Blakeney said. “We’re going to have to depend on each other in terms of our everyday routine in terms of getting around, ordering food, ordering drink. It’s going to be really important for us to depend on each other. That’s what these trips do. First and foremost, we have a group of guys who are great young men. We’re very lucky on that front. They all like each other and they’re friends. That really helps.”
The hope is that bond and chemistry will be strengthened even more and translate to the team’s performance when the season begins.
The Bison lost 40 points per game from last year’s roster due to team members transferring out of the program – including leading scorer RJ Cole – after Kevin Nickelberry resigned following nine seasons as coach of the Bison. The 18-man roster for the coming season includes just three seniors and three juniors. The remainder of the squad is made up of freshmen and sophomores.
“It’s giving us an opportunity to learn who they are as young players,” Blakeney said, “and they can learn who we are as a staff. It’s an opportunity to grow a little more during that period. You really can learn a whole about your team through competition. This trip will provide that for us.
“Everything is so new. I just want to have the opportunity to take a step every day toward getting better. It’s a great opportunity for some of our younger guys to step up and establish themselves as key guys in our program. I would love to see some consistency out of whoever is going to step up and help the key guys. At the end of the day, I would love to see our guys play hard and for us to grow daily with practices.”
NCAA regulations permit team members in summer school to practice four hours a week with coaches present, as well as four hours of weight room workouts a week. The full team will begin practice ahead of the tour on July 30.
The additional practice sessions are an opportunity for Blakeney to accelerate his development as a head coach.
“Those extra practices are paramount, not only for the players, but for me as a coach,” he said. “I’m a first-year head coach. Even though I’ve been around and had some experiences, I’ve never been a guy who has run a practice or coached in a game. This experience is going to give me an opportunity to find my voice; it’s going to give our staff an opportunity to learn and find their voice, and it gives players an opportunity to get better daily in a new system. This trip and practice are paramount for us and couldn’t come at a better time.”