After eight years as
an assistant coach, Scott Cross took over as Texas-Arlington's
head coach last April. Known as a good recruiter, Cross
has a lot of work to do as the Mavericks lose their three
leading scorers from last year's 14-16 team.
Shawn
Siegel (CHN): How does this year's schedule compare to
recent seasons in terms of difficulty?
Steve Cross (SC): It
might be a little more difficult because of all of our road
games. We play at North Texas, at TCU, at UTPA, at Illinois
State, at Western Illinois, at Oklahoma, at UC-Riverside, at
Texas Southern, and at Texas in non-conference alone.
CHN: How will you deal with the losses of your graduating
seniors?
Steve Cross (SC): It will
be very hard to replace the outgoing seniors. Steven Thomas
finished his career as the 2nd leading scorer & 4th
leading rebounder in the history of the program. Jarrett Howell
was an extremely, tough hard-nosed player that could really
defend and score, and he was a great leader too. Both Steven and
Jarrett were 2nd Team All-SLC. Brady Dawkins started
almost every single game for us at the PG position last year. He
is basketball IQ, court vision, passing, 3-pt shooting, and
leadership will be tough to replace. Kenneth Henderson was the
utility player that did a little bit of everything. He always
guarded the opposing team’s best player, and he did a great job
of rebounding and was a good leader too.
CHN: What
will the strengths and weaknesses of
this year’s team to be?
SC:
I
think that our strength will be our inside players. We have
three really good returning post players in Anthony Vereen,
Jermaine Griffin, and Larry Posey. We also have a couple of
extremely good 3-pt shooter in Rodrick Epps and Brandon Long.
Our weaknesses lie in having no seniors on our team. We will
definitely need one of our younger guys to emerge as a leader
because we lost a lot of leadership last year.
