One Player Leaves, Another Fills His Spot

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Attrition and addition are normal parts of Division I basketball programs

BEAUMONT - One player leaves, another fills his spot.

In the wild, often-unstable subculture of college athletics, sometimes the only constant thing is player movement.

Graduations and dismissals beget new recruiting classes. If the coach is lucky, the new players are at least as good as the old ones, and if the coach is really lucky, the new guys are better.

Such is the life of a coach, who learns he is only as good as his players - and, therefore, as good as his skills in evaluating talent and recruiting it.

Steve Roccaforte is hoping those skills haven't left him.

Lamar will likely sign three players during the NCAA's early signing period for basketball players, which began Wednesday, but the Cardinals could sign as many as four by the end of the year.

The program has two seniors, Brandon Chappell and Dee Burchett, whose scholarships will open up once their eligibility expires. Lamar should have two more scholarships to give because two of this year's signees, Franklin Reed and Terrell Powell, left the team before its first exhibition game.

Reed quit during preseason conditioning. Powell and Roccaforte came to a mutual decision for him to withdraw from the university and return home to Los Angeles.

But three other players - senior Blake Whittle and sophomores Brandon McThay and Larry Handy - left before their eligibility expired, and they did so upon Roccaforte's wishes.

"I'm not mad at them at all," Roccaforte said. "I told all our guys from Day 1 that there were certain things I wanted them to do. Maybe they didn't think I was serious or that it wasn't a big deal. I don't know; you'd have to ask them. But the bottom line is that the guys who did what I asked, they're here. The three guys who didn't do what I asked are not here."

Player attrition is hardly rare when a new head coach takes over a program, since Division I scholarships are guaranteed only for one year, not for a four- or five-year period.

Coaches can choose not to renew a player's scholarship for any reason - be it because the player did not perform as expected, because he didn't get along with teammates or simply because he wears the wrong socks to practice.

Roccaforte, for his part, gave his reasons for cutting loose the three players last month.

Roccaforte said that on the day he was hired, he told the returning players and their parents exactly what he expected of them.

Among those requests, he said, was for all players to stay in Beaumont for one of the school's summer sessions and participate in Lamar's offseason conditioning program - a program that some returning players said was the most rigorous they've ever had.

"Man, conditioning was not fun for anybody," sophomore Lawrence Nwevo said last month with a grin.

Whittle, who averaged 8.1 points and 3.3 rebounds per game last season, said he asked Roccaforte if he could go home to Baton Rouge, La., where he would work for his father's business and follow his own workout program - a routine he said former Lamar coach Billy Tubbs allowed him to do.

Whittle said the matter was still unresolved when he left town - but that two weeks later, he got a letter saying Roccaforte chose not to renew his scholarship.

"I got a letter - about two weeks after the last day of school - I got a letter (from Roccaforte) saying he would not retain me on scholarship," Whittle said. "I enjoyed all three years there a lot. It was 10 times the experience I thought it was going to be. ... But that was it. Once I got that letter, that was that; I wasn't coming back to play at Lamar."

McThay, a native of Deerfield Beach, Fla., averaged 4.5 points and 11.3 minutes on last year's team. Handy, a Houston native, played in just three games. Both players have turned up at Kilgore College, where an attempt to reach them was unsuccessful.

Roccaforte declined to say why exactly McThay and Handy transferred, but added that he helped place them both at Kilgore under coach Scott Schumacher - someone Roccaforte has known for almost two decades.

"Again, I have to do what's best for my team," Roccaforte said. "For the guys that did everything I asked them to do, it's not fair to them if I hold those guys to a different standard. If I allow one guy to get away with something, why is that fair to the other guy who did all those things and didn't complain about them?"

As it stands, Lamar will begin its first season under Roccaforte at 7 p.m. Saturday against Texas Southern in the Montagne Center.

The Cardinals will dress eight newcomers, most of whom began practicing full-time together just last month.

Roccaforte's advice to the fans? Patience, please.

Lamar may have dropped its first exhibition on Nov. 1, but his team showed improvement in a 74-63 victory over Central Oklahoma on Tuesday night.

"The one thing that I do know about these guys (is) that they're hard-working guys and they want to win," Roccaforte said after the exhibition.

"That's good. That's not bad, that's good. They really care about what's going on. If people can just be patient, I think in the end, people are going to be real happy with what they see."