The bulk of questions and discussion surrounded the status of Marcus Ginyard.
Do you expect Marcus to practice today and do you have an idea when he might play again?
“I don’t know. I’m very – you pick the adjective – frustrated, concerned. But I just thought and Marcus thought that he would be farther along at this step. We are even discussing holding him out for a little bit and just letting him rehab and seeing if he can get back to that point where he was in the past. And if that’s the case, we’ll be a heck of a lot better off. Again, the guy was our defensive player of the year.
“You look at our club right now – is there anybody that we can put out there that can make life miserable for the 6-foot-3, 6-foot-6 guy on the other team? And I don’t know that we have. He hasn’t practiced 50 percent of practice yet. Not a single practice that he’s had since he came back that he’s practiced at least half the time. There’s some times when I’d like to have a healthy Marcus Ginyard out there and we don’t have him.”
Is the problem that there is pain in the foot, or is it just conditioning?
“I don’t know that you can put a finger on it, but I’ll say it to you this way – is it the Marcus Ginyard that you’ve seen the last three years? And that’s what I’m standing on. In practice, I don’t see the offensive rebounds. I don’t see the steals.
“I put him in the game the other night against Boston College down the stretch, and who else did I put in with him? Do you remember the substitution? Bobby [Frasor]. Why did I put those two guys in? Because they were going to get to the right spot. Not necessarily because when they got there, they had the most.
“Because if you were to list Wayne, Bobby, Danny, Marcus – who would you put as the least athletic of that crowd? Bobby, but he was going to get to the right spot and we were trying to trap and those kinds of things. Marcus, mentally, he knows where to go, but when he gets there, he doesn’t have a heck of a lot in the tank.”
Is there any situation in which you could envision red-shirting him?
“Right now, I’m trying to get Marcus ready to play for our team. Period. You guys look at it yourself – isn’t there sometime that you’re going to want a healthy Marcus Ginyard? And that answer is every day. But you also open your eyes yourself and look at it and we don’t have that right now.”
Has he practiced this week?
“Yes, he’s practiced every day this week. He will practice today. After today, I don’t that, well, I don’t know what I’m going to do with him. I really don’t. I’m just being honest. I don’t know what I’m going to do with him. But I will say this again – he has not practiced 50 percent of any practice all year. So that means that he won’t practice 50 percent of practice today, either.
“We’re trying to… I don’t know, guys. We’re in unchartered waters. What was he operated on, Oct. 8? So I’m thinking on Dec. 3 [is when he will play]… And I don’t think the doctors would have told me I was wacko at that time…
“There is one f’ing source – that’s frickin’, don’t put anything in there that’s not there – and I don’t know.
The transcript tends to trunctuate some things. I listened to the audio and he was fairly testy faced with the persistence of the reporters trying to get an explanation. Also not mentioned here is Roy saying that Ginyard basically was out August and September with a high ankle sprain which was unrelated to the stress fracture. Ginyard then had the surgery at the beginning of October and missed whatever time associated with that. That is a lot of time to not play basketball.
On a side note, this sort of reminds me of my junior year of cross country at UNC Greensboro. I started team practice in August with a good summer of training behind me but developed tendinitis in my knee and missed around two weeks of running having to do the bike instead. When I returned I practiced well but in my first meet at Western Carolina I did not finish. In subsequent meets I found that for 1-2 miles of the five mile race I was fine but after a certain point my body shutdown. Through the rest of the season I was posting times that were 2-3 minutes worse than any race I had run in the previous two seasons. My coach tired various pre-race routines to try and shake me out of the funk but in the end nothing worked. For whatever reason I never got back to the level of running I had been out for two years and never figured out why. I left the team and went to work in the SID’s office during my senior year not wanting to put myself thorugh another season like that one.
All of that is to say that I hope Ginyard is not going through the same thing. This sort of thing happens from time to time. Certain players have an injury and regardless of how mentally tough they are or how hard they work, that “something” which divides the elite players from everyone else gets lost. Hopefully that is not the case but I have my fears.
Discuss 
