Florida State head coach Luke Loucks wants to approach recruiting and the transfer portal a little differently than other big schools. The Seminoles aren’t a blue blood, but they can certainly outpace and outperform those schools under his watch.
Coming from the NBA coaching circles, Loucks has seen the best of the best. He did help coach Steph Curry, Kevin Durant and Draymond Green with the Golden State Warriors after all.
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So what’s the pitch for Florida State basketball? They’re coming off an 18-15 campaign in his first season at his alma mater, so something’s going right!
“Yeah, so we can do things a little bit differently than most staffs in America,” Loucks said on Pardon My Take. “There’s probably two other staffs that can do what we can do and preach the message, in terms of, you come to Florida State, we are going to train you like a pro, because that’s all we know. Half of our staff came from the NBA. So, in terms of your player development, your nutrition, your weight room, all these kids say they want to get to the NBA, but then they train like college kids.
“Now, the great ones will get there either way. It doesn’t matter, but for all those guys in the fringes, like you’re training like a college player, and I’ll tell them, I used to run draft workouts for multiple organizations. The best college players would get an NBA workout and have no idea, because everything’s different – spacing is different, the cutting is different, ball movement’s different, the terminology is different. We’re going to train you like an NBA player before you get there, so when you get there, you don’t just get there, you can stick. And I think that’s first and foremost.”
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Loucks isn’t just going after the big fish. Him and his staff know where to find the diamonds in the rough and that can make Florida State a special place.
“The second thing I’m a big believer in buying stock low,” Loucks said. “And right now, like, we haven’t been to a tournament in four or five years, but you can feel the momentum of, like, all right, we got some good things going.
“You can go to one of these top programs, and I’m not going to name them, and just be another guy on their list of, or you can come to Florida State and help us turn this into one of those programs. And to me, a lot of kids resonate with that, like I go to Florida State and, like, be one of the guys everyone remembers. Or you can go to Big Blue Blood and, like, yeah, you’re just a list of another 100 guys, no one’s gonna remember you.”
