Survivor? Try Gillispie's workouts at Kentucky

Kentucky’s basketball team hasn’t played more than a scrimmage, but it already has accomplished something. It survived new coach Billy Gillispie’s strenuous two-week boot camp.

“It was brutal,” guard Jamel Bradley said at SEC media days in Birmingham, Ala. “There was so much running.”

But it wasn’t all physical.

“It was a lot of mental conditioning,” Bradley said. “When you reach that breaking point, you just want to give up. Your mind is saying, ‘I can’t go anymore.’ But your teammates would say, ‘You can do it.’

“We needed each other to get through it.”

The best drill was the last one.

“Oh,” Bradley said, recalling his relief at finishing the program. “I felt like we had won a championship.”

No. 1 Motivation: If the Lady Vols are looking for motivation, they can find it in a preseason basketball publication.

They return four of five starters from their national championship team. They have basketball’s most successful coach in Pat Summitt and the game’s preeminent player in Candace Parker. They also have added a recruiting class that includes three consensus high school All-Americans.

But Athlon’s preseason basketball magazine doesn’t even rate them as the best team in the SEC. It ranks them third nationally behind UConn and LSU.

Praise For Donovan: SEC coaches are still lauding Florida coach Billy Donovan for winning back-to-back national titles.

“He put on a year-long clinic on how you deal with a national championship team that has everybody back, how you deal with expectations and how you deal with players who are going to be drafted,” Vanderbilt coach Kevin Stallings said of Donovan. “It was as masterful as their play. Just the way he controlled how that team should think was beautiful from a coaching perspective.”

The Doctor’s Out: Arkansas coach John Pelphrey said his parents wanted him to become a doctor or lawyer. He had other ideas, and they didn’t include that much studying.

Pelphrey checked out the engineering school at Vanderbilt. It made a huge impression.

“When I saw all the work they had to do … wow!,” Pelphrey said.

He figured out early on that he wanted to coach, and it has paid off. At 39, he’s already the head coach at Arkansas.

And he is taking over a program that returns all of its starters from a 21-win team.

Another Dunker?: LSU’ All-American center Sylvia Fowles might join Parker as a dunker this season.

Fowles, who is 6-foot-6 and was a high jumper in high school, said new coach Van Chancellor has encouraged her to dunk in a game. As a high school senior, she dunked twice in the same game but has never tried it in a college game.

Free-throw shooting, not dunking, was a point of emphasis for Fowles in the off-season.

“I’m not shooting the ball as flat,” said Fowles, who is shooting .596 from the foul line for her college career.

Impact Transfer: Andy Kennedy was named Associated Press SEC coach of the year last season after winning 21 games in his first season at Ole Miss. Despite losing three guards off that team, he’s optimistic about more success this season.

One reason is 6-5 guard David Huertas, who sat out last season after transferring from Florida.

“He’s an immediate-impact guy,” Kennedy said.

Welcome Back: Former Ole Miss coach Rob Evans as returned to the SEC as an assistant on Pelphrey’s staff.

Evans was Ole Miss’ head coach for six years, leaving after the 1997-98 season to become head coach at Arizona State. He won only 49.8 percent of his games in eight years at Arizona State.

Sports editor John Adams may be reached at 865-342-6284 or adamsj@knews.com.