Squeeze Play

By Rick Freeman

Being an optimist, Brian Ellerbe would say that his glass is half full. But most Michigan basketball fans, steeped in pessimistic tradition, won't even say the glass looks a third full this season.

Traylor is gone, they say. There's no frontcourt, they say. Defenses will collapse on Louis Bullock and Robbie Reid and Michigan will finish closer to the bottom than the top of the Big Ten, they say. And those are the nice things.

"I think the big thing right now is to not draw conclusions until you've seen the basketball team play," Ellerbe has said to all of the pundits. "Obviously, we've got some guys who haven't had an opportunity to play. That doesn't mean that they can't play."

Ellerbe's an optimist, but he doesn't pretend to know the future.

He can look in his planner, and before him, his life unfolds in sheets of paper. But what isn't in his planner, what can't be in his planner, are all the extra moments, the ones that fall through the cracks.

Like the scattered handful of time he has when he comes off the floor after practice at Crisler Arena. He often makes a recruiting call from the phone by his locker. "It's very convenient," he said. And recruiting is one of those things that he can't find enough otherwise lost moments for.

Even at 1 a.m., Ellerbe will still be calling recruits. It's only 10 a.m. on the West Coast, and he likes to squeeze the most out of his day. Which is a good attitude to have when you coach a team that will return only three players with anything more than limited experience.

Talent gushed from the pores of the Wolverines of old. Now, Ellerbe will have to squeeze every last drop he can out of his team.

His first step was trying to to sweat it out of them.

n n n

In seasons past, off-season training for the Wolverines was done at their leisure. Ellerbe decided that he'd change things just a bit. When his team returned in the fall, they were going to be in shape and made spring workouts mandatory.

And hard.

In the thick heat of summer, their hardwood dreams began to take shape on soft grass and artificial turf. The Wolverines ran distances on the golf course, where the cross country team runs. They did sprints on the field hockey team's home turf. And, of course, they ran the steps of Michigan Stadium.

While construction workers added sinew and flesh to the stadium, the Wolverines did some renovations themselves.

Up, over, down, over and up again. All the way around in 15 minutes - or they had to run it again.

"Everybody made it," said senior guard Louis Bullock. "Everybody made it because nobody wanted to run it again."

Especially not in a stadium that grew as they ran in it. But at least the streets of Ann Arbor didn't grow longer as they ran on them. It just seemed like it sometimes.

Especially on the one cold day in October when not everyone made it around their two-mile road course in enough time.

"Ohhh," Bullock groaned, "It was rough."

But there was no avoiding it. With tired bodies made even more miserable by the growing cold, Bullock and his teammates chased the clock around the course again.

"It was tough, because it seemed like it got a little bit colder," Bullock said. "The wind started picking up a little more and just smacking you in your face.

"You're thinking to yourself, if you don't make this time, he's gonna make us run again. So you're trying to give it all you got, but your body is just at the limit. But you know, we pushed through it and everybody made it. You feel good about yourself after something like that."

Bullock noticed how good he felt in practice, too. Drills that used to leave him winded no longer did. If a play needed to be played out to be mastered, and not just walked through, no problem. The Wolverines were ready.

Bullock noticed something else. Something was different with Josh Asselin and Brandon Smith. They were in shape, of course, but they had something they lacked last year.

A summer of banging bodies with tall, sweaty Europeans, while not everyone's idea of self-improvement, seemed to have instilled in the two sophomores a toughness that as newcomers with limited playing time, they might have lacked last season.

"I can definitely tell that Brandon and Josh got better," Bullock said. "You can see the change in them knowing that they're gonna have to be on the floor and they don't have Robert Traylor or Maceo to rely on to do well in the post, now it's their job.

"You can just tell that their attitudes have changed knowing that they're going to be on the floor."

And so have their teammates' attitudes toward them. Last season, they were just freshmen.

Now, they're starters.

"I think Brandon's got unlimited potential and I'm excited for people to see that," senior guard Robbie Reid said. "I can see his skills and abilities increased."

The pounding the Wolverines took this summer was preparation for the rough stuff they'll receive this season, from both opponents and observers. Not only Smith and Asselin, but every one of the Wolverines will be setting screens like a TV factory working three shifts.

And when it comes to physical play and you're facing teams with more talent, it's better to give than receive.

"I felt like one of the most important things for us was to get physically stronger and bigger so that we can dish out some things and not be the recipient of those sorts of things," Ellerbe said.

"We want to dish out some punishment."

But despite such a sunny outlook on the season, they know the line between the pulverizer and the pulp in the Big Ten is a thin one. It's fine to talk about improvement in the off-season and the possibility of surprising some people. It's another thing to actually do it.

"Do I think we have room to breathe?" Reid said. "No."

"We have a young team, we've got an inexperienced team. And we know that from day one we're going to have to work and scrap for everything."

n n n

Ellerbe's schedule leaves little space - or time - for breathing. And almost no time for eating. His days begin only a few hours after the previous one ends. Usually, coffee and a morning-long meeting with his assistants starts him off, then practice and more meetings take him to the early evening.

And that's when the chills come. Like ravens coming home to roost, they serve as ominous reminders. They keep him from forgetting the neglect he's shown himself and his body.

"I get chills a lot," Ellerbe said. "I get chills at the end of the day, around six o'clock or seven o'clock." He smiled and shook his head.

"I'm bad. I don't eat right, I know it," he said. "But I take vitamins.

"Psychologically, I think I'm meeting it halfway. But it's so much to do. And you want to be there for the players,"

Especially when the one who had been there for them for so long is suddenly yanked away - the way Steve Fisher was when he was fired.

During the turmoil, practice became a refuge for Ellerbe, a place isolated from an outside world swirling with rumors and ill will. A place for "watching the guys work really hard. Watching them work on something, seeing them execute it and then watching their faces when they know they did a good job."

It still is his refuge today. It's still what keeps him going, what makes all the hungry, shivering nightfalls worth it, as well as all the late nights that follow.

"I'm gonna be up, regardless, this time of year, because there's so many things swirling in my mind," Ellerbe said.

And with his planner, he can sort those things out. In his planner, he can control how the future should be. He can plan for his team to be the surprise of the Big Ten. But he can't do anything about the people who have already relegated his team to a half-empty - or worse - season.

"We don't need to be prodded by a newspaper article or a radio show to get us geared up to work hard. We don't need to be prodded in that way," Ellerbe said.

The stairs were enough. Ask Lou.

11-12-98