SEATTLE — By the time Jon Brockman was finishing his freshman season with the Huskies, playing in the NCAA Tournament seemed like the norm for Washington.
Brockman, a starting forward during that 2005-06 season, had watched the Huskies play in two NCAA Tournaments while he was still at Snohomish High School, and now he was with the team in San Diego, helping the Huskies advance to a second straight Sweet 16.
This was the new era of Washington basketball under Lorenzo Romar, and Brockman was ready to make a habit out of these tourney appearances.
Or not.
Just when it looked like the Huskies were poised to join the nation’s elite programs, youth and inexperience caught up with them. Talented recruiting classes weren’t enough to overcome the losses of players like Brandon Roy, Bobby Jones, Nate Robinson and Will Conroy.
The Huskies went 19-13 during Brockman’s sophomore season, but that wasn’t enough to earn a postseason berth. Last year, the Huskies qualified for the College Basketball Invitational at the end of the year, but lost their opening game to finish 16-17, the team’s first losing record since finishing 10-17 in 2003, Romar’s first season at Washington.
This season, with Brockman leading Washington’s most experienced team since that tournament run ended three seasons ago, the Huskies are looking to start a new run of NCAA Tournament appearances.
“I’ve got to get back to that thing,” Brockman said. “That little taste I got as a freshman just wasn’t enough.”
It’s been three and a half years since Brockman was an All-American forward at Snohomish, and now, with practice less than a week away and the regular season starting in just over a month, Brockman is ready to start the final season of his accomplished UW career.
“Yeah it does,” Brockman said when asked if this year feels different. “It gives a whole different perspective to things. The little stuff, you just start thinking, ‘This is the last time I’m going to do that, the last time I’m going to be doing this.’ I wish I would have known what this felt like when I was a freshman, sophomore, junior, just because I would have had a better understanding for what those other guys were feeling. Because it definitely means a lot more knowing this is the last time you’re going to do it.”
According to Romar, Brockman has become a man on a mission heading into the 2008-09 season. That’s not to say Brockman hasn’t always been one of the team’s hardest workers, but he’s ramped up the intensity even more this season.
“I just know that he has been on a mission this summer and this fall,” Romar said. “He has worked really hard. If you would see him, you would not guess he weighs 250 pounds, you’d think he’s probably 225, 230 because he looks so sleek. But he is every bit of 250 pound. Our guy Matt Ludwig, our strength and conditioning coach, has done a phenomenal job with our guys during the summer. If you look at them, you can see there are some different looking bodies out there. Our guys are in better condition and Jon is one of those guys that has benefited from it.”
Justin Dentmon, another senior eager to get back to the postseason, has seen a change in Brockman and a change in everyone on the team, especially in fellow seniors Brockman and Artem Wallace.
“You see it in all of us,” he said. “You always want to go out with a bang your last year. You see a change in him, and then once you see a change in him you see a change in everybody else. Yeah, you can see it.”
As good as Brockman was last year, Romar is convinced that the 6-foot-7 power forward will be even better this year. As the head coach has pointed out a number of times, Brockman has made big improvements each season. After averaging 8.4 points and 6.5 rebounds as a freshman, Brockman upped those numbers to 14.2 and 9.6 two seasons ago, earning all-conference honors. Last year, with more of the offense going through him, Brockman became one of the Pac-10’s most dominant inside presences, averaging 17.8 points and 11.6 rebounds, the latter total ranking third nationally.
A similar jump in production would have Brockman in discussions for All-America honors.
Of course, one easy way for Brockman to improve his scoring average would be to take advantage of opportunities at the free throw line. After shooting a respectable 66.7 percent and 66 percent in his first two seasons, Brockman — and just about every other Husky — struggled at the line last year. He shot just 51.9 percent at the line last season, and, in a moment that seemed to define the Huskies’ season, missed a pair of free throws in the final seconds of the one-point loss that ended Washington’s season.
“I went on a free-throw mission as well I guess you could say,” Brockman said. “I think my final number that I made over the summer was 11,400 or something like that … I’m shooting it a lot better. I changed some things up. I just kind of cleaned up my mechanics and got to where I was shooting the same way every single time. I’m still working on it, but it’ll be better this year.”
Brockman spent three nights per week over the summer working with Gary Doty, a coach he has worked with going back to the summer before he was in eight grade, and the main focus of those workouts was free-throw shooting.
Brockman would make 500 free throws per night, sometimes even stretching it out to 600 or 700 makes. Doty would make Brockman do high-intensity drills between sets of free throws to fatigue him, and tracked every miss, every make, and even every shot that hit the front rim — a problem for Brockman.
Brockman said he averaged about 86 percent over the summer, and Doty noted that Brockman sank 100 of 103 attempts in one of their sessions.
“It’s something that we realize as a group we need to do a lot better,” Brockman said, “because it cost us some games last year.”
Doty has seen Brockman go from middle schooler to All-American candidate, but for all of the player’s improvements, Doty is most impressed with how Brockman hasn’t changed. In his 30 years of coaching, Doty has encountered one player who has thanked him after every single practice or workout: Brockman.
When Doty took Brockman to a recent offseason workout with Stanwood High School players, Brockman didn’t just make an appearance, give a quick speech and head home. Instead, he went through the entire two-hour session, threw himself on the floor, and played with the same intensity that has led to five broken noses in his career and countless more for opposing players.
“When I talk about Jon Brockman, I can talk all day long,” said Doty.
And apparently he wasn’t kidding, taking over 15 minutes to answer three or four questions about Brockman.
Brockman, who had ankle surgery to clean out bone spurs at the end of last season, says the ankle is better than ever. Playing completely healthy — which he wasn’t for much of last season because of the ankle and a groin injury — and surrounded by the team’s best mix of experience and young talent it has had since that Sweet-16 season in 2006, Brockman thinks this team could look a lot like the one he remembers from that freshman season.
“We were kind of just riding on the backs of those other guys when we were freshmen, and I draw a lot of similarities between that team and this team we have this year just in the fact that that team had veterans who could carry the load, could take on the challenges of each game and put the pressure on themselves,” he said. “They knew what they were doing, they were experienced and they didn’t exactly have to rely as much on us freshmen. But us freshmen could come in and help out wherever we could. It’s really similar to this year’s team.”
Similar team, and Brockman and company hope, a similar end result.
Herald Writer John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com. For more on UW sports, check out the Huskies blog at heraldnet.com /huskiesblog
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