This is the time of year when the USF men’s basketball coach puts together the non-conference schedule for the upcoming season.
It’s not easy.
It requires finding 15 teams with openings that match up with the Bulls, primarily in the first two months of the season. The late Amir Abdur-Rahim and Bryan Hodgson quipped that the better the Bulls got, the lesser the chance of finding a high-quality opponent — particularly in power conferences — willing to risk getting thumped by a mid-major team like USF.
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But Chris Mack is working on it and has inked some games that won’t deflate USF’s strength of schedule rating. The Bulls already have games lined up with St. Louis, the College of Charleston, and just added a home-and-home with DePaul.
The latter game has a little intrigue beyond the court.
When Mack and DePaul coach Chris Holtmann were in the Big East — Mack at Xavier, Holtmann at Butler — they had some epic, high-intensity battles from 2015-17. There’s nothing that suggests personal animosity between the two, but friendship goes out the window when the ball goes up.
Xavier and Butler are separated by only about two hours, so there was the neighborhood element to it as well. Basketball coaches are generally wired pretty tight anyway, so this could be entertaining.
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And, of course, the matchup with Charleston will have all sorts of angles. It’s where Mack coached the last two years before coming to Tampa. He got a sneak peek at his future home court when he brought Charleston to the Yuengling Center last December. The Bulls won that one 85-79.
For what it’s worth, I was texting with Hodgson shortly after he left to take the Providence job. I suggested he should sign a home-and-home with USF, adding that it would be “e;ic.” He responded with a heart emoji, so it might be worth a phone call to area code 401 and see if something could be worked out.
Meanwhile, Mack put the finishing touch on his rebuilt roster for the upcoming season by signing 6-foot-5 guard Donovan Waleskowski, a transfer from Holy Cross College, an NAIA program located near Notre Dame. He was the freshman of the year in his conference, and was 32.7 percent from behind the arc.
And yes, Holy Cross is the place where Rudy Ruettiger attended to get his grades improved enough to gain acceptance to Notre Dame.
Or more interest to Mack, however, is where Waleskowski attended high school. He was a standout player for St. Xavier High School, a powerhouse program in Cincinnati located about six miles from the Xavier campus where Mack coached from 2009-2018. He would be familiar with the high-quality basketball played at St. X.
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The Bulls’ roster consists now of three seniors, one graduate student, four sophomores, three pure freshman, one redshirt freshman, and three juniors.
This article was originally published on www.greengoldandbold.com as USF builds out its non-conference men’s basketball schedule and adds another player.
