WATCH: College Basketball Coach Furiously Calls Timeout to Make His Team Run Sprints During the Game
Sports fans often complain athletes have gone soft and hard-nosed coaches are a thing of the past. But that’s only because they don’t watch enough Arkansas-Pine Bluff basketball.
33-year-old Solomon Bozeman is in the middle of his first season as head coach of the Arkansas-Pine Bluff men’s basketball team. Wednesday night, Bozeman’s college basketball squad was getting blown out by Iowa State 44-24 and the head coach was furious.
With 18:20 left in the second half, Bozeman signaled for a timeout and shockingly made his team run sprints on the court, in front of everyone. Surely expecting their coach to draw up a play or make a substitution, the Arkansas-Pine Bluff Golden Lions men’s basketball team instead started running baselines.
I’ve never seen this before. Arkansas Pine Bluff’s head coach called a timeout last night just for his players to run baseline to baseline. You might see that in AAU, but not college basketball.pic.twitter.com/B3sy2lhtio
— Michael Swain (@MSwain247) December 2, 2021
Teams don’t like running sprints in practice and they probably never even thought about the idea of having to run sprints during a game. But Bozeman went next level by showing up his players and making them run sprints on the road, with a hostile Iowa State crowd looking on.
Arkansas-Pine Bluff is 1-8 on the season, Iowa State is the 19th ranked men’s basketball team in the country. No one expected the Golden Lions to keep pace with Iowa State, but Bozeman still demands a certain level of effort and he was dissatisfied with the way they defended a fast break dunk by Tyrese Hunter.
The motivational sprint session wasn’t enough to inspire the Golden Eagles to complete the comeback and notch their second win. But losing to Iowa State by a score of 83-64 means Bozeman’s team trailed by only three points during the game’s remaining 18-minutes after they were forced to run sprints.
