Caretaker: Martin guides

LIFE OVER SPORTS

Martin leads team through tough times as coronavirus wipes out end of season

No one is stronger in their convictions than Frank Martin, but on the night of March 11, the South Carolina head coach was conflicted.

Martin was sitting in Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, scouting the ArkansasVanderbilt game in the first round of the SEC Tournament. His Gamecocks were slated to play the winner the next night, but that’s not what was on Martin’s mind.

As the sports world was bracing against the rapidly spreading coronavirus, sports leagues around the nation, including the SEC, were making plans to play without fans in attendance. And rumors were swirling that the remainder of the SEC Tournament might be canceled altogether.

Though his team was still fighting to make the NCAA Tournament, Martin was torn.

“Just being around so many people … I was having reservations,” he said. “We are husbands and we are fathers and we are caretakers of these young men that other people trust us with. I felt an obligation to be around my family, care for my mother, my wife, my children who were left behind and there was a certain level of uncertainty going on that I needed to be there for them.”

Then Martin started thinking about his players, who had poured their hearts and souls into the 2019-20 season and were anxious to play with a postseason berth on the line. The growing pandemic was the furthest thing from their minds.

By Jeff Owens | Executive Editor • Photos by Travis Bell and Allen Sharpe

Frank Martin and Maik Kotsar

“Was exposing them to sickness worth playing a game?” Martin said. “I don’t think it is.”

The next morning, Athletic Director Ray Tanner called Martin and warned him that a decision on the tournament was coming soon. A few hours later, the SEC Tournament, along with dozens of other conference tournaments around the country, were canceled, a move Martin was “at peace with.”

“I commend [SEC] Commissioner [Greg] Sankey for making the decision he made. It was difficult for sports, but it was the right one for life,” he said.

Martin and his team immediately began making plans to return home. By the time they arrived on campus, the NCAA Tournament had been canceled, all athletic activities, including practice, had been suspended for all sports and students and studentathletes had been told to go home.

The following morning, on Friday, March 13, Martin gathered his players for a brief team meeting. He was worried about his players, who were devastated at not being allowed to play in the SEC Tournament and distraught that their season was officially over. So was Martin, but his biggest concern was their safety and well-being, and their priorities.

“I asked the players, did any of you have any concern or were worried in any shape about playing in that game, and they all said absolutely not,” Martin said. “They weren’t worried about it and were ready to go, which is kinda why I felt a responsibility to be home with my kids. Because that age group, they don’t tend to take these things as seriously as we need to and this is where the adults have to step in and protect young people from themselves some time.”

By two in the afternoon, Martin’s players were on their way home. The only exception was senior forward Maik Kotsar, who injured his shoulder in the final practice of the season and needed surgery. Though his season and career were over, he had surgery on March 17 and remained on campus to rehab with trainer Mark Rodgers.

With the season over and his team taken care of, Martin went home to care for his family. With the nation preparing for a lockdown to battle the spread of the virus, his focus shifted from coach back to fulltime father and family caretaker.

We are husbands and we are fathers and we are caretakers of these young men that other people trust us with.

– FRANK MARTIN

“The last 10 days seem like 10 years,” he said on March 23. “We are all dealing with an unknown. You are told to stay home for two, three, four days, it’s no big deal. It’s like spending a weekend at home, but I’m going on nine days where we’re pretty much shacked up here at the house and only left the house to go to the grocery store and get some to-go food for the family.”

For six months, Martin guided and molded a team of 18- to 22-year-old athletes. He helped a young, inexperienced team overcome some early disappointments and develop into a tight-knit group that finished the season 18-13 (10-8 in the SEC) and still had a shot to make the postseason with a strong showing in the SEC Tournament.

But with the season over and his players scattered far and wide, it was time for him to focus on his children, a job he often equates to managing his team.

“I’ve got three kids from 12 to 21 and the 21-year-old is used to being on his own

Frank Martin with assistant coaches (from left) Chuck Martin, Bruce Shingler and Perry Clark

now and is bouncing off the walls,” he said. “He wants to work out and he wants to be around people and trying to manage that dynamic … they always look at you as the father and one of our biggest responsibilities is to always give them hope and give them guidance as to what is important, and this is a difficult time and we have no idea what is in front of us. All we have is hope and faith and we have to maintain things and that’s what I’ve been trying to share with them.”

With the campus on lock-down, Martin continued to talk to his staff by phone and the coaching staff created a group text to stay in touch with the players and make sure they and their families were safe and doing their best to cope with what had become a national health crisis.

Martin’s message to his players was the same as for his son Brandon, a member of the basketball team at USC Upstate. Brandon, he said, was anxious to get out of the house and return to the court, so he had to be stern and direct.

“The responsibility that we have to stay safe is not just for ourselves but to keep the people in our family safe,” he said. “This is not the time to go to some weight room or go to some gym and play basketball, because you don’t know. You don’t know who’s sick, you don’t know who’s been where. There’s no way to track which one of them has had a family member or a neighbor or someone who is abroad. There is so much unknown in all this, this is the time to just be patient.

“My biggest concern right now with my players is not basketball, it’s to make sure they understand that they should stay home because they owe it to their parents to make sure they don’t get sick so they don’t get their parents sick.”

On March 23, student-athletes returned to class but had to transition to online and virtual curriculums. That produced a whole new set of challenges for Martin, his staff and academic advisors.

“This is brand new and some might have had an internet course, but not all of them,” he said. “My biggest concern is the tutoring part of it and making sure that learning specialists can still connect with our players and the staff at the Doty [Academic Enrichment Center].”

As his players resumed their studies and tried to adjust to a new way of life, Martin tried to put a positive spin on the bizarre situation and offer both his players and fans a bit of hope and optimism. “Hopefully we can use this moment,” he said, “to give our fans and everybody who cares about the Gamecocks and our team and school and players a little bit of time to kind of step away from the life we are forced to live right now and give us a little bit of hope and hopefully something to smile and talk about other than the coronavirus.”

Martin believes team could have made NCAA Tournament, excited about future THE GOOD PLACE

By Jeff Owens | Executive Editor • Photos by Allen Sharpe

Stetson. Stetson. Stetson.

That name, that team, had been stuck in the minds of South Carolina basketball fans since Dec. 30, the dark day when the Gamecocks lost to the Hatters, a 5-9 team picked to finish last in the Atlantic Sun Conference.

The loss, which dropped South Carolina to 8-5 in non-conference play, haunted the Gamecocks all season. Many feared the loss to Stetson — which actually finished fourth in the A-Sun but had an RPI of 250 — would be the blow that ultimately kept the Gamecocks out of the NCAA Tournament.

Even Frank Martin fretted over the loss, experiencing the same fears as his players and fans.

“Not only have I heard it from a lot of people, I heard it from my kids, I heard from my staff and I heard it from myself,” he said. “I would sit at home yelling at myself while staring at the ceiling because we lost a game that we are supposed to win.”

We’ll never know just how significant — or insignificant — the Stetson loss really was. The Gamecocks finished the season 18-13 (10-8 in the SEC) and still had a chance to make the postseason entering the SEC Tournament. But the conference tournament and NCAA Tournament were canceled before South Carolina ever took the floor in Nashville, ending a season of highs and lows that left Martin and Gamecock fans both disappointed and encouraged.

Martin liked his team from the start. He had four starters returning in senior Maik Kotsar and sophomores AJ Lawson, Keyshawn Bryant and Justin Minaya. They would get a big boost from redshirt freshman Jermaine Couisnard, sophomore Alanzo Frink and a trio of exciting freshmen.

His biggest challenge, though, was youth. In the third year of a “reboot,” Martin had just one senior after a series of dismissals, defections and injuries to key players after the 2016-17 Final Four run. Of his 15 available players, 12 were freshmen and sophomores, including nine in the regular rotation.

So much youth made the Gamecocks vulnerable to earlyseason upsets, like the hiccup against Stetson and a November loss to Boston University (RPI of 139).

“I’m not making an excuse … but when we got young again, we are exposed a little bit to losing a couple of games early,” Martin said. “Not because we aren’t talented, not because we are not trying, but because of the fact that we are young.”

That’s why Martin was able to swallow the Stetson loss and move on. His team was certainly not the only team from a Power 5 conference suffering early-season woes.

“It happens, and we have to have patience when you have young guys, especially guys that you like and that you care for. You can’t allow winning and losing to impact that relationship,” he said.

The Gamecocks also had to deal with some tough injuries. Bryant, the team’s best player in the preseason, suffered a knee injury and missed the first eight games of the season. When he returned, it took him several weeks to return to form and it wasn’t until the final five games of the season that he emerged as the player Martin expected to see all season.

But, just like the past three years, Martin’s patience began to pay off when SEC play began. After starting 0-2 in league games, the Gamecocks upset No. 10 Kentucky in a buzzer-beating thriller at home and scored an impressive road win at Texas A&M. After falling at Auburn, they reeled off three straight wins and won six of seven to improve to 16-9 overall and 8-4 in league play. Suddenly they were surging and looking like a postseason team.

“We were playing at a high, high level and I was coming home and telling my wife, ‘we have a chance, this team has a chance, we are starting to turn that corner,’” Martin said.

Then the injury bug — a harrowing problem since the Final Four team — struck again. The Gamecocks lost Minaya to a broken thumb against Missouri and improving freshman Jalyn McCreary to a concussion against Tennessee.

Still, they kept battling. After tough losses to LSU and Mississippi State, they won an overtime thriller at home against Georgia. After another tough road loss at Alabama, Minaya returned to the lineup and the Gamecocks beat Mississippi State by 12 at home. Though the regular season ended with a gut-wrenching loss at Vanderbilt, they headed to Nashville for the SEC Tournament looking to put together another streak and still make a run at the postseason.

“I was a little frustrated with some of the line of questioning toward the end of the year,” Martin said, “because it was like a disappointment, like we had no chance to go to the NCAA tournament.”

Martin didn’t buy that. Though troubled by the swirling rumors and developments surrounding the rapidly spreading coronavirus (see page 14), he believed his team was poised to

win at least two games in the SEC Tournament and play its way back into the postseason conversation.

“We were right there,” he said. “We have to go into the conference tournament and figure out a way to win on Thursday and Friday, and if we do we are right back in the conversation. Now we don’t know, and some people want to call it a disappointing season, that’s their prerogative. They have a right to make judgements as they please.

“But I know this: internally, I am extremely excited. I’m proud of our guys, I’m proud of how they fought this year, I’m excited about where we are headed and I truly in my heart believe we were going to go into that SEC tournament and play really well and put ourselves back in the middle of that whole tournament if we had been given the opportunity.”

As he helps his team deal with the disappointing and premature end to the season, Martin is encouraged by the progress made this season and excited about what he has coming back. The team loses only Kotsar, grad transfer Micaiah Henry, who rarely played, and possibly Lawson,

whose NBA hopes are suddenly uncertain after the whole sports world has been turned upsidedown by the pandemic.

Bryant, who had three double-doubles in his last five games, and Minaya both return, as do improving frontcourt mates Alanzo Frink, McCreary and 6-11 Wildens Leveque. They will be joined by signees Ja’Von Benson and Patrick Iriel, two more athletic big men Martin says “are going to be really, really good players.”

The backcourt will be led by Couisnard, who turned out to be the Gamecocks’ best player. After taking over as the starting point guard, the redshirt freshman averaged 12 points and three assists to make the All-SEC second team. If Lawson, who led the team with 13.4 points per game, returns, the Gamecocks will once again have a dynamic backcourt. Backups T.J. Moss and Trae Hannibal also return and South Carolina could get a huge boost from the addition of senior Seventh

Woods, a former South Carolina high school star who sat out this season after transferring from North Carolina.

Woods, who

Martin said was practicing at a “high, high level” toward the end of the season, could take over at point guard, allowing Couisnard to become an explosive scorer at shooting guard. For that to happen, though, Woods or someone else must demonstrate the leadership and personality Couisnard showed during the second-half of the season. Martin said he needs multiple players with that kind of toughness and charisma. J e r m a i n e C o u i s n a r d

“If he’s at the two, that means somebody has a real good personality and the talent to displace him, then we are a better basketball team,” he said. “If he’s at the one, then whoever is at the two is going to consistently be a better player because he’s at the one. That’s a dynamic that moving forward, I think we have multiple options there. … I am really, really happy with the guys we have in place to compete with and against Jermaine for that point guard job.”

With the core of this year’s team likely returning and another deep team in place next year, Martin believes his reboot and rebuild might finally be complete, giving him a group that could break the three-year slump of missing the NCAA Tournament.

“I think we are in a really, really good place,” he said. “I’m excited about recruiting, I’m excited about the work ethic in place, the character, there’s a lot of things in place. Does any of that guarantee winning? No, but when you have all those things in place, what matters is that guys continue to push themselves and grow and get better.”

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