Tigers begin next year, today
By: rmacrae@bellsouth.net March 23, 2015

By Will Vandervort.

While Clemson’s football team resumes spring practice today, the men’s basketball team will begin prepping for the 2015-’16 season in earnest as it begins individual workouts with the coaching staff.

Of course, the Tigers would have loved to have been practicing for the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament, but days like today are the foundation of building NCAA and Sweet 16 teams of the future. Of course, no Clemson team has experienced the Round of 16 since the 1996-’97 season and Brownell’s last four teams have fallen short of making the NCAA Tournament after a run of four consecutive years of dancing in the Big Dance from 2008-’11.

Brownell allowed his players that are coming back next season to take spring break off in order to heal their wounds from a 16-15 season, which included a first-round loss in the ACC Tournament to Florida State.

“We will meet as a team and then start in on individual work,” he said. “We have already looked at it and we are going to get three or four good weeks of work with our guys and I think that can begin to set a tone for expectations and habits for the summer.”

Establishing good work habits will be important considering next year’s team will be without a true home venue. Clemson is scheduled to get started with its plans for a new Littlejohn Coliseum, which will cost the athletic department $63.5 million, later this spring following the school’s commencement exercises.

The Tigers plan to play all of their home games at Bon Secours Wellness Center next season with plans to open the new facility at the start of the 2016-’17 season.

“It will be much more difficult for our team just in terms of planning on driving an hour for games and not being in the same facility that you shoot in almost every day,” Brownell said. “We are not going to all of sudden start driving to Greenville to practice or anything like that. I don’t think we will practice much at all up there.

“That is something we are going to have to work through. It is what it is. We can’t control that so we are not going to worry too much about it.”

Both basketball programs will practice at the Jervey Gymnasium next season, which they will have to share with the volleyball program for the next year.