Mark Wiedmer Mark Wiedmer Photo by Contributed Photo /Times Free Press. The hotel room’s clock showed 3 a.m. In less than 19 hours, the Florida Gators would face Ohio State in the 2007 men’s basketball national championship game inside the Georgia Dome. Win, and the Gators would become the first school since Duke in 1991 and 1992 to repeat as NCAA champions. Having watched hour upon hour of video on the Buckeyes, young Gators assistant Matt McCall expected head coach Billy Donovan to finally send the assistants off to bed in the wee, small hours of that April 2 morning. Instead, Donovan looked at McCall and said: “Matt, let’s play that Illinois-Ohio State (game) tape one more time.” Maybe that last bit of study turned the tide, maybe it didn’t — but the Gators did chomp down on the Buckeyes 84-75 a few hours later. Of course, that same Matt McCall is now the head coach for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball program; he’s also the just-named Southern Conference coach of the year in his first season on the job. And while he didn’t admit to yet ordering his own staffers to stay up until 3 in the morning to prepare for this weekend’s SoCon tourney, McCall did confide Wednesday that he has already assigned one of them to prepare for VMI and another to prep for Samford, since the winner of their first-round game on Friday will face the Mocs in a noon quarterfinal on Saturday in Asheville, N.C. “The main thing for me this week is to focus on the positive,” McCall said. “I want the players to understand that we’re built to handle anything that comes our way.” At Florida, a football school with next to zero basketball tradition before he arrived for the 1996-97 season, Donovan built a program the envy of every school in the Southeastern Conference, save perhaps King Kong Kentucky. And if the Gators weren’t quite as dominant as the Wildcats in the league tournament, they did win it four times and finished second on three other occasions under Billy the Kid, including topping Big Blue twice in the final. The Mocs, as most know, haven’t won the SoCon tourney since 2009 and haven’t won a single game in the event for the past five years. …
Continue Reading: Wiedmer: McCall truly prepared for tourney basketball
