Ravens pressured to stay on top

By Philippe de Montigny and Kiran Rana

The Carleton Ravens men’s basketball team is going into the holidays undefeated, but the break from classes doesn’t mean a break from practice.

Dave Smart, the coach of Carleton’s team, will hold his team to a strict training schedule throughout the holiday season.

“We’ll practice pretty hard through December,” said Smart, who will run practices until Dec. 21st. “Then we go to Florida and have a 10-day training camp.”

Players will get a six-day break, regrouping on the 27th for two days of practices and then leaving with their coaches and therapist to Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Being first in the Canadian weekly standings and with a decade-long reputation that includes nine national championship titles, the Ravens are constantly reminded of the stakes.

“Our coaches make sure we don’t get complacent,” said Philip Scrubb, Carleton’s star player and fourth-year commerce student from Richmond, B.C. “They remind us every day that other teams are coming for us and they try to make our practices harder than games.”

“We practice a couple times a day, just get out of here and work on some stuff as a team,” Scrubb said of training camp.

“We play a lot of five-on-five and four-on-four so we just make sure every drill is competitive,” he said.

Ravens captain Kevin Churchill said their coach, being a family man, is not a fan of taking his players away from home during the holidays.

“It’s a bit of a give and a bit of a take,” said Churchill, a master’s student in philosophy at Carleton.

“We’re going down there—somewhere nice, somewhere warm—to get a lot of work done as a team.”

Smart is known by players for his tough love tactics. The coach can often be seen on the sideline, shouting and waving aggressively at his players, regardless of their score lead.

“We just know he says stuff in a way that might be tough for some people to handle but the stuff he says is right and he knows what he is talking about,” Scrubb said. “We just try to listen to the message and not really how he says it.”

Looking ahead at the Canadian Interuniversity Sport championship, the Ravens’ coach and captain anticipate tough competition from other national contenders such as the University of Alberta Golden Bears (9-1), the Ryerson University Rams (8-1) and the University of Victoria Vikes (9-1).

“There are a lot of teams out there that have legitimate shots and we’re very aware of that,” Churchill said. “As soon as you get complacent, someone’s going to knock you off the top.”

In their final game before the holiday season, the Ravens defeated the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees 94-73 at Carleton on Friday. Both teams, currently in the top two spots nationally, sported eight wins and no losses coming into the sold-out game.

Coach Smart said his team has to be more consistent, even though the Ravens held a strong lead throughout, with the Gee-Gees holding a brief and meagre one-point lead early in the second quarter.

“We got to defend better,” he said after the game, with sweat dripping down his face. “Much better.”

Despite the 21-point winning margin against uOttawa, Churchill said results and standings this early in the season have little bearing on how the new year’s games will play out.

“Ottawa’s a good team and I’m not sure we got their best game,” Churchill said. “I know they’re going to be motivated to try to get us back.”

James Derouin, the Gee-Gees head coach, agreed.

“There’s no question we’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said after the game.

“Eighteen offensive rebounds from their team was something we were worried about coming in and that’s exactly, in my opinion, where we lost the game.”

The two teams will next meet at the Canadian Tire Centre on Jan. 21, 2014.

Churchill, for his part, remains wary of his uOttawa rival.

“We’ve got a target on our backs,” he said.