Colorado begins practicing with plenty of new faces

BOULDER — Buffs basketball is back!

Colorado took to the court Tuesday morning for the first practice ahead of the 2021-22 season. The Buffs have an exhibition game scheduled for Oct. 31 at Nebraska before opening the season Nov. 9 in Boulder against Montana State.

“Every year the first day of practice the energy is there, the butterflies are there,” head coach Tad Boyle said after practice.

This year, the Buffs are jam-packed with new faces. Former starters McKinley Wright IV, D’Shawn Schwartz and Dallas Walton are gone and a big class of freshman—a class ranked 13th in the country by 247Sports—has replaced them.

“You have to approach it differently,” Boyle said. “We have to do a lot more stopping, a lot more teaching, a lot more correcting, a lot more drills to build habits. Not that that’s not important with a veteran team as well but I think the attention to detail with a younger team is—you have to teach them.”

Senior big man Evan Battey is excited to have the new group around him.

“They’re so competitive and so full of life,” Battey said. “Sometimes having older guys you get into your old ways and you already know what to do so it’s like you don’t really compete as hard. But these guys push everybody to compete.”

Battey has enjoyed taking on a mentor role with the younger group. They hang out outside of practice, going to CU football games together for example.

On the court, he’s figuring out how to be one of the key voices of leadership for the team.

“The young guys look to me for direction,” Battey said. “I’m in a position where I can spread some knowledge and really help them going forward. When I leave here, my value is I want my influence to stick with them.”

Colorado got a bit of a head start developing the young guys in August when they took a team trip to Costa Rica. They played four games against local teams, sweeping the competition by a combined score of 392 to 163.

While the competition wasn’t what the Buffs had hoped for, the ability to build some camaraderie and hold 10 additional offseason practices was invaluable.

“The 10 practices were beneficial and I can’t imagine where we’d be today if we didn’t have the Costa Rica trip,” Boyle said. “Where we are today is lightyears ahead of where we would be if we didn’t have those 10 practices.”

Over the next five weeks, Colorado will build up the newcomers enough for them to be ready to contribute. The Buffs have two returning starters (Battey and Eli Parquet), three more returning rotation pieces (Keeshawn Barthelemy, Tristan da Silva and Jabari Walker) and two more returners who should be ready to crack the rotation this season (Nique Clifford and Luke O’Brien).

The rest of the minutes will be given to the newcomers.

“Habit-building is a process and that’s what we’re in the process of doing,” Boyle said. “These guys are all gifted offensive players—they wouldn’t be here if they weren’t. But defensively, sometimes, being the best best player on the school team maybe they weren’t asked to guard the best player on the team.”

Only 42 more days until game day.