Florida coach Billy Donovan addressed a variety of topics on Monday’s Southeastern Conference men’s basketball coaches teleconference.
On Florida building through transfers, with six transfers on UF’s current roster: “When you’ve got a high school player going through the recruiting process there is so many things coming at them and they don’t have any level of experience playing in college, so they don’t know what maybe college life is like or getting acclimated to a team, a new environment, new coaches, weightlifting, tutoring, academics, there’s a lot that goes into these guys playing. Sometimes, guys don’t make the best choices in terms of what is going to make them happy, and I think when you know when you have a guy transfer in, there’s just a different level of maturity, a different level of understanding because they’ve got a pretty good foundation to really have an idea of what’s important to them and what’s going to make them happy.”
On recruiting transfers: “You always want to get to the core of why a kid is transferring because in a lot of ways their problems that they may be enduring at one institution are not going to go away at another one. The things that they are going to be required to do on the court may be the same at the next place they go to. I think trying to figure out why a young man wants to change would be really important to me.”
On coaching Team USA to a gold medal for the third straight season last week in the FIBA Americas 18-under tournament championship: “USA basketball did a really good job bringing in a lot of talented players … The one thing that you see is when you are competing for something bigger than yourself and you’re representing our country, most of their guys put their egos aside and they try to compete and win because they understand they are playing for a pretty big cause as it relates to playing nationally or internationally. And I think when they get an opportunity to play on a team like that, they understand the standard on what USA basketball is trying to do globally in the game of basketball.”
