Mick Cronin downplays difficulty of Thursday-Saturday swings, emphasizes mindset

Navigating the Thursday-Saturday swings in the Pac-12 can be difficult, but the mindset UCLA coach Mick Cronin has developed has made things relatively straightforward for the Bruins.

He operates on a three-man scouting rotation, with one of the assistants responsible for preparing the scouting report and organizing the team’s gameplan every third opponent.

The actual difficulties playing Thursday and then again two days later on Saturday?

“For me I started my career as a head coach at Murray State and that’s how it was in the Ohio Valley,” Cronin said. “Travel partners. You play Thursday-Saturday. So it’s back to what I had known.”

UCLA is on the Oregon swing right now, having knocked off Oregon State in Corvallis on Thursday.

“You’re on the road. You’ve got all day Friday to get the guys acclimated to who you’re going to play Saturday. I mean your Thursday game’s a normal game, you’ve got all week.”

Does Cronin ever try to frontload a little bit of preparation for the Saturday opponent earlier in the week, before the Thursday game?

“We wait for Friday. You get ahead of yourself in sports, the problem is you’re sending a subliminal message to your team,” he explained. “We’re gonna win Thursday so we’re already working on Saturday. Bad message to send to your team.”

Cronin explains how he manages Thursday-Saturday swings

That’s not to say Cronin hasn’t found creative work-arounds to make sure his team gets in the preparation it needs to. He just might mask how it looks in practice to avoid his guys knowing they’re working ahead.

“Now there’s times where you might have to, you’re not going to be able to practice much on Friday, obviously you’ve got to get rest, that you might have to work on something like zone offense or press offense, something that’s going to happen Saturday, that you actually need to get some practice time in, but you wouldn’t tell your team why you’re doing it,” he said.

Cronin himself often gets a little scouting done for the Saturday game in on the preceding Sunday.

But he also has staffers he trusts to always have his team prepared, regardless how little advance time there is in preparation on the Thursday-Saturday swings.

“That’s why I try to always hire guys who I think could or should be head coaches,” he said. “Those guys are always working ahead. They’re always working ahead.

“Personally I’ll take Sunday and look at who we’re going to play on Saturday, so then it’s Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday on the Thursday. But when the (Thursday) game’s over and I’m on the bus busing from Corvalis to Eugene, I’ve already got some notes from my postgame the last time we played them and those couple games on Sunday. But it’s a normal routine for our players and I think all the Pac-12.”

UCLA will complete the second half of its Thursday-Saturday swing on Saturday with a 10 p.m. ET game against Oregon. The game will be broadcast on ESPN.