Quick turnaround // A Janevia Taylor update

After a grueling intra-squad scrimmage with referees Wednesday evening, the Rainbow Warriors were back at it this morning. It was a less strenuous day than usual, however, as coach Gib Arnold focused primarily on non-contact and transition drills following a lengthy film breakdown of the scrimmage.

Arnold used the quick turnaround as a lesson for his guys.

“After this morning I said, ‘Are you tired? Are you sore? Are you hurting?’ They all said, ‘yeah,’ and I said, ‘Perfect. We wouldn’t be doing our job if you weren’t tired, sore, or hurting.’ And we talked about how there’s times when it’s gonna flow, and times when it’s gonna grind. And this part of the season is the grinding season.

“And there’s going to be another during the season, when you’re playing back-to-back games, or you’re on the road and you just got off a plane trip and you’re tired, sore and hurting, and you gotta come to work and still gotta grind.”

The workload has increased for senior point guard Hiram Thompson, who’s just one of two active point guards (along with freshman Bobby Miles) now that Anthony Salter is sidelined about two weeks with a tear in his left heel.

“It’s pretty tough after a hard day like yesterday then waking up early, but once you get loose and everything, it’s not as bad as you think in the moment. It gets better,” Thompson said.

On Salter’s injury, he said: “It’s definitely a bummer that Salt’s out. It’s nice to have another point guard out there to run the rotations, but me and Bobby need to take advantage, get more reps, and work even harder to learn and get better.”

The Rainbows practiced in Gym 1 for the first time this season. It’s usually used by  the UH volleyball teams, but some renovation work was being done on Gym 2 yesterday.

“A lot of us didn’t have full legs. Luckily we were in Gym 1 with the 9-foot goals, so we were actually able to dunk a few,” senior forward Bill Amis said. “I know if we were in Gym 2, it would have been all layups. … Zane (Johnson) was dunking.”

———

A couple readers inquired about former UH women’s basketball player Janevia Taylor in Wednesday’s blog entry. I realized it had been a while since I had heard anything as well, so I asked former Wahine assistant coach Serenda Valdez, who visits Nevi just about every time she’s in California.

She said Janevia, who has been in a coma for about three and a half years (since an auto accident in summer 2007), is in a care facility called  All Saints in North Hollywood. In Serenda’s last visit in July, Janevia appeared to understand some of what was being said to her; Serenda said Janevia was tearing up a bit when the subject was on Wahine basketball.

Sadly, as far as progress on emerging from the coma, there hasn’t been anything big that I’m aware of at this time.

———

In regard to comments — the very first time you comment on this blog, I have to manually OK your post. But once I do that, I think you can post freely from that point on.

Sorry for the inconvenience on that, I try to check it regularly.