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Todd Golden turns attention to offseason workouts, building team chemistry

Untitled_design__8_-removebg-previewby:Pat O'Donnell•05/27/22•

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New Florida coach Todd Golden. (UAA Communications)

As May comes to an end, the Florida Gators men’s basketball team will turn the dial and begin to prepare for Todd Golden’s first year as head coach of the program.

Up until now, Golden and his staff have been building and maintaining the roster for the upcoming season. There is still one spot left, but the focus now shifts to summer workouts.

“We get eight weeks in the summer,” Golden said. “We’ll start June 6. We’ll go about four weeks and give our guys a week off around July 4 to give them break in the middle summer to spend with family or whatever they wanted to do, then go another three or four weeks on the back side of that.”

Golden said the eight weeks will be split into two segments. The first segment will be individual based while the second segment will be “kind of off-the-court team development.”

Considering the Gators have a new coaching staff and lost seven players to the transfer portal or the end of their eligibility while bringing in two recruits from the 2022 class and four players from the transfer portal, there’s a lot of work to be done to make this team actually work as a team.

“Getting their creative juices flowing. Getting them comfortable, confident. We’ll do a lot of that two or three a week in the first part of June,” Golden said. “I would say as the summer goes on into the fall and the season goes, we’ll kind of pull off the individual stuff and focus on the team stuff.”

Points of emphasis from Todd Golden

Individually, the Florida players will get to work on just about every aspect of their game.

“A little bit of all that in the sense that in the summer we let all our guys work on different parts of their games,” Golden said. “So, it’s not just the guards working on ball handling and shooting. We’ll have [Jason] Jitoboh out there bombing 3s, seeing if he can get comfortable and let it fly. Really opening these guys up a little bit.”

Moving to the team’s development as a whole, it’s not going to be entirely working out on the court together. Todd Golden mixed it up with his San Francisco squad to build chemistry.

“Corny stuff, things you’d do if you were your elementary school kid,” Golden said. “Seriously, we did yoga last year at Golden Gate Park with our team. Getting guys out of their comfort zone together is really important.

“It looked odd because we had five or six 7-footers out there. But otherwise, it was a pretty normal thing for San Francisco.”

Golden mentioned former UF basketball player Patric Young’s escape room in downtown Gainesville, America’s Escape Game. He said his staff could also take the team there.

“It’s just spending time together outside of practice, outside the facility where you learn more about people and give yourself the ability to build real a relationship with them,” Golden said.

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