The University of Maine men’s basketball team was competitive in large parts of many games last winter.
Take the Black Bears’ first five America East contests of the 2018-19 season. Four times they led at halftime but earned only one victory.
Of the team’s 16 regular-season conference games, 10 were decided by nine points or fewer. UMaine went just 2-8 in those decisions.
As the Black Bears prepare for their second season under head coach Richard Barron, consistency is the byword as the team aspires to play well throughout each contest and not be bedeviled by short stretches of decisive struggles.
“We’d win 35 minutes of the game but the other five minutes it would be 19-0 [against us],” said senior co-captain Andrew Fleming, the 6-foot-7 forward from Oxford Hills High School in South Paris who last season earned second-team All-America East status.
“I think this year everyone understands it, and that’s why we’re going to be able to get past it and really start to be more consistent,” he said.
That effort began with off-season workouts and has continued through preseason practices this fall with the ultimate goal of being steady and heady on the court.
“The good players play within a tight range, and they do it consistently every day,” said Barron, whose team plays its first preseason game at 1 p.m. Sunday against Husson University at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor. “It’s not what they can do once in a while, it’s what they can do repeatedly.”
That approach is stressed as much during preparation as it will be during games.
“We want to have good practices every day, not just have a couple of good practices and then fall back the next day,” senior co-captain Sergio El Darwich said.
El Darwich and Fleming see considerable progress being made on the consistency front despite the youthful makeup of the UMaine roster. Fleming, El Darwich, junior center Miks Antoms and junior forward Vilgot Larsson are the only returning players who saw regular game time for the Black Bears last year.
They are joined by four others who redshirted last season after seeing little or no game action: sophomore guard Misha Yagodin, junior forward Nedeljko Prijovic, sophomore forward Solomon Iluyomade and freshman forward Stephane Ingo.
New to the program are seven freshmen: guards Ja’Shonte Wright-McLeish, Agah Kizilkaya, Peter Stumer, Precious Okoh, and Taylor Schildroth of Blue Hill and George Stevens Academy; and forwards Ata Turgut and Veljko Radakovic.
“The eye test tells me we’re better, but we’re also young and naive,” Barron said. “There’s a difference between gaining knowledge and execution, and right now we’re learning, we’re in that gaining knowledge stage.”
That’s one reason exhibition games such as UMaine’s encounters against Husson and McGill University of Montreal (on Nov. 3) are so valuable. They also offer fans two chances to see the Black Bears play before they begin a 14-game nonconference schedule that includes only four home contests.
“Until we have [games] we can’t really know how much we’ve learned and what we need to work on,” Fleming said. “During practice we can stop and work on the same set for five plays in a row so the four times after the first one you know exactly what you’re supposed to do.”
Fleming, the lone Black Bear entering his fourth year on campus and a member of this year’s America East preseason all-star team, hopes UMaine’s quest for consistency can bear competitive results this winter.
But the Black Bears finished just 5-27 last year, and the program is 18-78 during the past three seasons, so gauging an immediate turnaround is difficult.
“It’s senior year, so for me I really want it to happen now, but it would really mean a lot to me if we could get the team back on track, and I’d know in 10 years when people look back they’ll say this all started when Andrew Fleming turned the program around,” Fleming said.
“I’d love for us to figure it out this year and make a run for the [NCAA] tournament.”
