With the regular season coming to a close and tournaments fast approaching, the Tampa men’s basketball team is working to put in a few more wins and hopefully play strong in the upcoming conference championships. At the beginning of the season, the Spartan team had a large win streak but recently has been dropping a few games. But even with the recent losses, Coach Richard Schmidt still has seen a lot of improvement in the team this year.
“We have seen a big improvement over last year; we’ve won 16 games but we feel like we should have won a few more,” said Schmidt. “We’re still a player or two away from being a top-notch team. We’ve improved ourselves by getting Da’Markco Foster and also getting Anthony Griffis back made a big difference.”
Seeing the improvement from last year to this year is something to be proud of, but the team still thinks there is more to improve on in the upcoming games and heading toward next year.
“We still need a couple of other players to really make our team stand out,” said Schmidt. “We’ve done well; we have won 16 games but we have lost more than we would have liked to lose. We were close in a lot of games but we just haven’t been able to get over that last hump.”
To be able to really show great improvement, Coach Schmidt thinks the team’s ability to score needs to be fine-tuned.
“A lot of times we haven’t been able to score,” stated Schmidt. “Our scoring isn’t the best and we just can’t score. When Anthony gets tired or Da’Markco is tired it makes it really difficult because we really only have two guys that can score. If you look at our stats, we have two guys that are averaging double figures but a lot of the teams in the league have about four or five guys who average double figures so that has been a problem for us.”
Not only has the team had difficulty with scoring, in a couple of games the team has had bad luck with calls against the team. Some of these calls have even cost games for the Spartans.
“We have had some bad luck in games,” said Schmidt. “The other night, there were a couple of calls that game that really hurt us and when we played Eckerd the first time, we should have won that game. We had the referee call two consecutive things that made us give up six points, which would have won that game. So we have had some bad luck.”
Even with the bad luck in games, the team is still staying positive knowing how much they have improved from last year.
“Like I mentioned before, we have seen a lot of improvement from last year especially in our defense,” recalled Schmidt. “We play pretty good defense throughout most of the games which is really good. I think once we get the scoring aspect down though, we will be one of the top teams in the conference.”
Knowing the regular season is coming to an end, the men’s basketball team is keeping their focus on their goals for postseason.
“Right now, we’re focusing on the tournament and we hope we can get better over the next three weeks,” said Schmidt. “That is our only goal right now, to get to a NCAA tournament and a conference tournament. That is the only thing we can hope for and that’s what we’re practicing to do.”
With their goal in sight, only time will tell if the Spartan team will pull through and accomplish a solid end to their rollercoaster regular season and a successful start to postseason. Their next game is Saturday, Feb. 23 at 4 p.m. when they host Barry.
Paige Shallcross can be reached at paige.shallcross@spartans.ut.edu.