OH, THOSE KIDS: Forget the Final Four, some members of St. John’s brash, young team are already talking NCAA title, and the season doesn’t even start for a few more weeks. (Anthony J. Causi)
Plan A didn’t work.
After hearing this summer that sophomore point guard Nurideen Lindsey said his expectation was for St. John’s to win the NCAA championship, coach Steve Lavin thought it wise to make his recruits off-limits to the press until they had a chance to get some media training.
But when asked at last week’s 2011 Red Storm Tip-Off about the team’s goals, Lindsey proved, to the staff’s chagrin, he still has the courage of his convictions. The goal is to win the NCAA title, he said.
“What we do is, we lock them away for six weeks and send them to a class in media preparation,” St. John’s assistant coach Mike Dunlap said jokingly yesterday at Big East men’s basketball media day. “Since that didn’t work, Coach Lavin said, ‘Dunlap, you’re in charge of talking them off the cliff.’ ”
Dunlap and the staff have had a better idea while Lavin recovers from prostate cancer surgery: Don’t let this young group get anywhere near the cliff.
To that end the eight scholarship players, five of which are freshmen or sophomores, have been subjected to some serious attitude readjustment. But not even the fact that the Red Storm were picked to finish 12th in the conference in the preseason coaches’ poll has stemmed this team’s optimism.
“Part of me likes it because I love the confidence and the attitude,” said freshman Moe Harkless of Queens. “But part of me looks at it like, ‘You can’t just expect that to just happen.”
Memo to the Red Storm: The successful teams in this league are experienced and tough, and talent puts you over the top. St. John’s has the talent. Dunlap and Co. are working on the toughness.
“The ebb and flow of it is we’d like to never cross the line but the fact of the matter is we’re always a little bit over the line, one way or the other and so there’s some spinning to do each day,” Dunlap said of the process of breaking down this team’s fragile cockiness only rebuild it with solid confidence. “We go to training table and just try to sit with them and let them take after you a little bit, tease you about something you said in practice; sit in the locker room; go to the tutoring session and just be with them for 15 minutes to let them know there’s something more important than basketball.
“It could be a call to their mother,” he added. “We do a myriad of things to fill the cup of emotion on the back end so they that we can take it away during practice and be hard on them.”
lenn.robbins@nypost.com