Worst access?

See Norman, that's what it should be like. The coach knows it benefits his program and is also a teacher/student of the game.

More often than not at the DI program (women's and men's teams just outside the Top 25) I cover, the coaches think the media is a distraction. If you coach a women's program that is breaking into the national polls, don't you want as much coverage as you can get?

 

Worst in my experience: Any Saban-coached team, Florida when Spurrier was still in office (can't vouch for South Carolina now), Florida in general, and Michigan.
Most accommodating experiences where the coaches led me to their assistants: Rich Rodriguez at West Virginia, Sylvester Croom, Kirk Ferentz at Iowa, John Beilein at West Virginia.

 

It's the same at Iowa right now under Todd Lickliter. We can watch practice, as long as we give them a head's up we're coming.

In the early years of Steve Alford, we never got to watch practice. That was modified a few years ago to only being able to watch practice on the day we had our weekly press conference. Of course, Alford would then have film session for 60 minutes, so we barely got to see anything.

 

wow. watching practice. what's that like?

 

Sounds like a great and wonderful fairy tale, of which most of us can only dream. I have a better chance of watching a unicorn hump a leprechaun than seeing my team practice.

 

Enjoy this while it lasts. Experience says if Iowa has the year it's predicted to, Lickliter will be adopting the same bunker mentality many other coaches are now employing in college hoops.

Hopefully I'm wrong, for your sake.

 

I find watching hoops practice to be enjoyable - you quickly see why guys play more than others, great insight into the type of coach the person is, and you often get to see the behind-the-scenes in-team jokes and coaches' true personalities - i.e. versus their at-a-podium-coach-speak - come out.

 

You're kidding me. A Dukie is a prick? No way.

The douchebag Dukie who amused me most was David Henderson, who strutted into Delaware as if he owned the place and immediately began acting as if HE'D won all those national titles. Closed practices, all that crap. He made the America East finals with Mike Brey's guys in his first year and then promptly drove a thriving mid-major into the ground. You couldn't try to ruin Delaware like he did. Nice work Dukie douchebag. Enjoy life as an assistant wherever you are now.

I wonder if Amaker is being a cock now at Harvard, where the Crimson are, oh, I don't know, the 135th-most popular team in Boston.

 

Certainly living up to your username there, fella, aren't ya?

 

I'll throw another vote DiNardo's way. I was in school when he was at LSU, and during spring practice he actually gave me a one-on-one interview for some class I was working on. I wasn't even working for the student paper at the time, mind you. Just a student with a homework assignment, and he gave me almost 30 minutes. That's always stuck with me, and blows me away the more of these stories I hear about other places.

A couple years later, I did get a job at the student paper. I wasn't invited to the cookouts like StaggerLee, but I do remember the Sunday afternoon "press conferences" in the athletic department. Just five or six writers, on average, sitting at a table and firing questions at DiNardo. Half the time he'd be up there in slippers. And after we finished, there was maybe 10 or 15 minutes of just bullshitting before he went down the hall for Sunday dinner with the players.
Very relaxed, very cool.