[Cider Jim]

For those starving for LU basketball news, here's an article from the Roanoke paper:

Is it time for a Gillen comeback?

Altizer provides scouting report on Calvin Baker
By Doug Doughty


Doug Doughty
Doug Doughty's UVa Insider is exclusive to roanoke.com and is posted by 5 p.m. Thursdays in season.

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It never occurred to me that Pete Gillen was 59 until I saw his name mentioned Wednesday in connection with the men’s basketball opening at Evansville University.

“Gillen would fit the Aces’ criteria,” read the headline over top of executive sports editor Dave John’s column.

Maybe so.

I wouldn’t know that Gillen would be interested in the opening at Evansville or at Liberty, another job with which his name has been mentioned, or if he still wants to coach at all.

I’d say that I haven’t spoken to Gillen since the day was dismissed, but that would be wrong. I didn’t speak to him that day either.

It disappoints me no longer to have a relationship with Gillen, a coach I had known since his days as a VMI assistant in the late 1970s.

Gillen can’t say that I got him fired, but I can still remember a testy exchange we had in the University Hall catacombs late in his UVa tenure, when I pitched a story on his timeout philosophy.

If memory serves, that story pointed out what a good record Gillen had in one- and two-point games, games in which he customarily had exhausted his timeouts.

Gillen’s name came up in another forum in the past week, when, for the second time this season, Wake Forest coach Skip Prosser pointed out that UVa’s two best players – Sean Singletary and J.R. Reynolds – are Gillen recruits.

So is the rest of the starting five, which lately has included Jason Cain, Mamadi Diane and Tunji Soroye.

Throw in Adrian Joseph and Lauris Mikalauskas and six of Virginia’s top seven scorers were brought in by Gillen.

That should make Gillen attractive to Evansville or almost any other school in search of a new recruit.

Gillen could recruit.

Virginia should make the NCAA field this year and so will two players who transferred after beginning their college careers at Virginia, Vanderbilt’s Derrick Byars and Massachusetts’ Gary Forbes.

A third Gillen recruit, post man Donte Minter, averaged 11.4 points and 5.0 rebounds while playing fewer than 20 minutes per game for an Appalachian State team that stands 25-7 and has a victory over Virginia.

In all fairness, Byars no longer would be eligible at Virginia if he had not transferred, and disaffection with Gillen contributed to his departure.

Would this Virginia team have gone to the NCAA Tournament with Gillen? That’s hard to say. After all, Leitao was the ACC coach of the year, Virginia’s first since 1982. But, Gillen was able to put together the nucleus of an NCAA team. That’s fair to say.

If I were Evansville, a former rival of Gillen’s when he was at Xavier and the Musketeers were in the Midwestern Collegiate Conference, this might make some sense.

SPEAKING OF TRANSFERS, one wonders how former UVa guard T.J. Bannister feels after transferring to Liberty on the eve of the 2006-2007 season. Not only did Bannister miss out on an NCAA Tournament trip, but the Flames’ coach, Randy Dunton, was fired before Bannister ever got to play for him.

IN AN INTERVIEW with walk-on Damin Altizer for an article that appeared in today’s Roanoke Times, it was interesting to hear Altizer’s thoughts on Calvin Baker, a transfer from William and Mary who has been ineligible this season at UVa.

“I think he’s really good,” Altizer said. “He’s definitely not as good as Sean [Singletary] but he holds his own. They have some battles where, if you just walked in the gym and didn’t know who was who, you’d think they were about equal.”

Former Bath County boys’ basketball coach Terry Bradley was amused when he was reminded that his 2005 team had two Division I players, one of whom, John Phillips, is on football scholarship at UVa.

“We weren’t thinking of that when [Radford's] Darris Nichols and those guys were stroking it that night,” said Bradley, whose Chargers were eliminated by Radford in the Group A playoffs.

“But, I’ll tell you one thing, if John Phillips (6-6, 257) had walked on, he’d have been a pretty formidable candidate, too.”

As a senior at Bath, Phillips finished one game with 32 points and 25 rebounds.

[WWJFD]

Coach Sherard played a role (some lead recruiter, some secondary) in recruiting all the current players, except for JR Reynolds, J Cain, and Donte Minter. Another reason why he should at least be considered for the Head job.