Martin not sweating unconventional offseason

As the coronavirus pandemic has continued to impact sports at every level over, most of the attention among the college ranks has been paid to football. It makes sense — the season kicks off two-and-a-half months sooner than basketball, and without a football season, there likely wouldn’t be enough money to fund the other sports. Thursday, the SEC became the latest league to take the unprecedented step of pivoting to a 10-game, conference-only schedule.

But in his first public conversation with local media since April, Missouri head basketball coach Cuonzo Martin revealed that the basketball offseason has felt just as much, if not more impact than football. The Tigers still haven’t had a practice with the full team present since mid-March, when the virus abruptly ended the SEC Tournament.

During a normal offseason, voluntary summer workouts would begin in early June — this year, it would have been June 8. The Missouri football team began workouts then, and Martin said about six basketball players returned to campus for those workouts, which could only be supervised by the strength and conditioning staff. Martin and the rest of the National Association of Basketball coaches ultimately decided on July 20 as the date when teams could resume basketball activities with coaches present, but Missouri has yet to get its full team on campus.

On July 2, Martin instructed the players who were on campus to return home, citing concerns about the virus and its potential long-term impact on athletes.

“I just said to our guys, everybody go home, be with your families, because I just don't feel good about the COVID,” Martin said. “I think that's the most important thing, be with your families. Now, they could stay here on campus if they wanted to, because all them guys were in apartments, but I encouraged them all to go home because I just felt that it was only right, because, for me, the unknowns of the virus. Five, 10 years down the road, that part we don't know, and what are we really doing, if their health and safety is the most important thing, what are we really doing here?”

Four players opted to stay on Missouri’s campus. Martin mentioned junior Torrence Watson and junior college transfer Ed Chang among them. Martin said the group has been participating in three 30-minute practices per week on the court in addition to four strength and conditioning workouts per week (mandatory activity is capped at eight hours per week by NCAA rules during the offseason). Martin said the group has been following the same set of virus safety protocols as the football team.

“How you come into the arena, you gotta go down and get your oxygen checked, you have to get your temperature checked on the way out of the arena,” Martin explained. “So you have all those protocols. You work them out with mask on. And, you know, we encouraged these guys at the time to go home as well, they chose to stay here, so we just felt like if they’re here, there’s an opportunity for them to work out here.”

Additional players continue to trickle back to campus. Martin hopes to have the full roster, including the three players who recently withdrew their names from the NBA Draft — Xavier Pinson, Jeremiah Tilmon and Mitchell Smith — back on campus by Aug. 13. Each player has to quarantine for 10 to 14 days upon returning to campus. Martin has targeted Aug. 24 as the date when full-team practices will resume.

Despite the unconventional offseason, Martin isn’t panicking. For one, the staff has been providing every player with workouts to perform at home since the pandemic started. With 11 of the 14 players on the roster being upperclassmen, Martin feels he can trust his players to stay in shape. He also noted that, when he played for Purdue in the 1990s, players spent the entire summers off campus, and he still managed to return in good condition every season.

“I don't think there's an urgency because, fortunately and unfortunately, guys have been working out somewhere,” Martin said. “When I came out of college, and it's not so many years ago, the coaches weren't allowed to work you out on the floor in the summertime. You had to do it on your own. So what I say to our guys, you'll be able to tell who got better in the summertime when they get back.”

Away from the court, Martin said the pandemic has come with some silver linings. He has taken a liking to holding Zoom meetings with prospects and their families, saying it’s a more efficient way to build a first impression and decide if a player is worth recruiting rather than spending the time and resources to visit that player in person. He’s also taken time to read — he said he’s read more books than in the past 20 years combined — and to reflect on ways to improve his coaching style. For the first time since he started coaching in 2000, Martin has taken the time to reach out to other coaches — he said he’s spoken with five to seven NBA coaches who used to coach in college — and pick their brains about ways he can improve.

“I've been blessed to talk to maybe five to seven guys that were college coaches but now they're in the NBA,” Martin said, “and I'll say, ‘If you came back to college, what would you change? What would you do differently? What’s the difference?’ … So just taking those notes and listening to those teams. For us, opening up offensively more, playing with more spacing, transition, all those things that are just things that I want to do, things that we need to do, and just being given the validation and comfort. But it's like I've had an opportunity to be a part of coaching clinics for three or four months. And it's been beautiful.”

Now that Pinson, Tilmon and Smith are officially back in the fold for the upcoming season, Martin doesn’t expect any more roster changes. Due to center Axel Okongo’s transfer to Eastern Michigan, the team has an open scholarship, but Martin said the staff doesn’t have any plans to fill it.

“There's nobody right now, I'd say, that we're looking at,” he said. “I’ve been saying this for several years and haven’t lived up to it, but you know, you're not gonna play 13 guys.”

Just because he doesn’t plan to give 13 players regular minutes, however, doesn’t mean Martin wants to have a shallow bench. He said he hopes to play at least 10 players each game, and he doesn’t anticipate anyone averaging more than 30 minutes a night.

“I think what Kentucky has shown over the past maybe six, seven, eight years, with a lot of guys that are one and done guys, you don't have to play 30 minutes to be successful,” Martin said. “You don't have to play 30 minutes to get drafted. I think that's a great blueprint for guys to understand, like as long as you're effective with your production per minute — and those are the things that we've talked about guys about, being productive per minute — I think with our personnel, I'm not sure we'll have guys play 30 minutes a night.”

As protests against racial inequality and police brutality enveloped the country as a result of the death of George Floyd earlier this summer, Martin became one of the most outspoken voices on the subject across college sports. Even though the protests have simmered down a bit, Martin and his players continue to discuss social justice issues on a weekly basis. For instance, on the team’s Zoom call Friday, Martin planned to show his players a video about former U.S. Representative and civil rights activist John Lewis, who died on July 17.

Near the end of Martin’s conversation with reporters, he was asked about what he plans to continue to do to address racial inequality with his players. In response, he embarked on an impassioned soliloquy about racial inequality. So as to do his remarks justice, the full transcript is printed below.

“I think for me, what it goes back to — and you guys probably heard me say this before — there's an older person inside of you that’s expecting and counting on you to do the right things. The right things, for all of us, can be uncomfortable. And you know, we talk about different movements, black lives movement, this movement, why this, why that. I think the movement is the truth. Whatever the truth is, that’s what we all have to live by. And I think that's the one thing that holds us all accountable. You can avoid it, you don't have to look at it, but the truth is what holds us accountable, and I think that is the most important thing. So like I say to our guys all the time, we can do a lot of different things. Just be real, just be true to it, and then you have to stand on it, and standing on something can be very uncomfortable, and I say to our guys, at some point your knees will probably buckle when you get uncomfortable. But if it's truth, then stand on it. And like I said to my son, maybe about three weeks ago, four weeks ago now, it's been so long. I just said to him, I said, guys, I don't know if I'll be on this earth to see true equality. I don't. I don't think I'll be on this earth. And not that I feel like I'm threatened by anything, but because that wealth gap is so far behind. But I still have to do my part as a humanitarian, and I have to do my part, and I’m hopeful that if I'm blessed to have grandkids, that they can see that this is a different world. When they’re on this earth and they’re living, and what we're talking about now, it's like, man, that's in a movie or that’s on a video. That’s not their world. It’s what they heard, or it’s what’s in a museum. When my daughter was born, the United States president was black. That was her first image when she stepped foot on this earth.

“So for me, it doesn't matter, black or white. It’s just about being good people. I think that's what we all have to fight for. And again, I think if we’re all living life, and we live in a level of comfort, but three blocks away or one mile away, that community is in a bad way, then who are we? I mean, I'm grateful to be sitting here. Grateful. And I thank God for it. But also there's a part of me in my soul, I know what it's like from family, friends back home in East St. Louis, or even on the St. Louis side, or you go to Detroit, and it's amazing how you can go to certain places in the United States and, okay that's a bad area. You don't have to go, you already know just because where's it at, the name. Okay, we know that name. Because it's been that way. So how does that happen? Why aren’t there any bad places in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming? Think about that. We have to do a better job, and by we, I mean we everybody on this Zoom call. We have to do a better job creating change, because if we sit back and say, ‘oh my life is good,’ how do you do that when you know people are struggling? When you know that the education system, it hasn't been equal? The justice system hasn’t been equal?

“It makes me feel good, it makes me feel good as a man — and I'll say this first before I answer that. My wife worked in the corporate world for 15 years, very successful. And if I wouldn't have gotten the head job, she was climbing up the ladder, I could have been a stay-at-home dad, and I would have taken pride in that. I would have taken great joy in that. So I had no problem with that. But because it's the other way around, it makes me feel good to be able to provide for my family. For me, that's a level of respect, all a man asks for — and I assume women ask for the same thing, not that I’m discrediting women, I think they’re very successful and all that, we’re all in this together. But it makes me feel good as a man to know that my wife respects the fact that I’m able to provide for my family. And I’m not talking about the level of money. But just think, as a man, he works construction, he’s able to provide for his family. That's a great feeling. Now imagine how I feel if I'm not able to provide for my family. So if I'm not able to provide for my family, how do you expect me to get money to provide for my family? What do I have to resort to?

The last thing I'll leave you with, and I've never been a part of counting anybody's money because people can say, well coach, you make this amount of money. Okay, but how do we leave this earth and somebody’s a billionaire and you have areas where people don’t have food, you have homeless? So I left this earth as a billionaire and I’m laying there in the casket, how does that sound? When you have that three blocks away, one mile away, or even two streets over? I think we all have to be better. We have to fight that. And we got a ways to go. I think we’re making progress.

“I thank God for my mom. There was no color, just people. There was no color. She was too busy trying to put food on the table. We didn’t have time to sit there and worry about color, white, black. We were trying to eat. And the last thing I’ll leave you guys with, progress is painful. Progress is painful, and it's a bumpy road, and it'll bring you to your knees. It will. But everybody on this Zoom call needs to be a part of change. You can write all the bad articles about me, that’s fine. You still gotta do your job, so I’m not trying to soften you up, now, you gotta do your job. But you also have to have a level of compassion and understanding that there is somebody less than, and always keep in mind, coach came from East St. Louis. … I'll send you a video of East St. Louis, where I grew up. I just went by there last Monday, and I’ll send you a video of where I grew up at. So now, when you see those kids four or five blocks from our campus, that was me. That was me.”