Notre Dame men's basketball: New road trip ‘refreshing’ for ND

ATLANTA - Visits to various Big East cities the previous 18 seasons often felt like a home away from home for the Notre Dame men’s basketball team.

The Irish stayed in the same hotels in Morgantown, W.Va., and in New York. A game against South Florida in Tampa might include dinner at the home of university benefactor and former Tampa Bay Rays owner Vince Naimoli, who then would be in the first row of the Sun Dome seats behind the Notre Dame bench. The same pony-tailed security guard was stationed outside the Irish locker room in Providence, while the same fan at Rutgers would ride Irish coach Mike Brey about his wardrobe.

Each time Notre Dame played in the Verizon Center against Georgetown, Brey stepped back to his days as a history teacher at nearby DeMatha (Md.) Catholic High School.

The security guard assigned to the visiting coach in the bowels of the building was one of his former DeMatha students, Xavier Redd. In the minutes before leaving the locker room, as Brey was busy with thoughts on how to handle the Hoyas, he and Redd would reminisce about their DeMatha days.

“There’s history in those places,” Brey said.

And success. Notre Dame closed out Big East affiliation by going 24-30 away from home over its final six seasons. It finished with a winning league road record (5-4) three times. Notre Dame won in Louisville. It won in two places in Connecticut – Hartford and Storrs. It won in New Jersey and in Philadelphia and in Washington.

A new basketball chapter begins Saturday (Noon, WMYS-TV) with Notre Dame’s first-ever road game in the Atlantic Coast Conference against Georgia Tech (9-6; 0-2 ACC). Now instead of visiting Morgantown and New York and downtown Washington, the Irish are in Atlanta and College Park, Md., and Tallahassee, Fla., and Winston-Salem, N.C., over the next two weeks with four of their next five away from home.

Brey and assistant coaches Rod Balanis and Anthony Solomon all have ACC ties (Brey spent eight seasons as an assistant at Duke while Balanis played collegiately at Georgia Tech and Solomon at Virginia) but none have coached at an ACC venue outside of newcomers Pittsburgh and Syracuse during their time at Notre Dame. And no Irish has played in McCamish Pavilion.

How long is the bus ride in from the airport to the hotel? From the hotel to the arena? Where is the visitor’s locker room? Which way to the floor? The interview room? Are the rims soft? What will the fan reception be?

“This is all kind of new,” Brey said. “It’s kind of exciting because it’s new. It’s refreshing that it’s new, trying to build some feel and some tradition on the road.”

When Notre Dame prepared to play a league game against Georgetown, it had a Georgetown drill it worked on in practice. There is no Georgia Tech drill. Not yet.

With no feel and no tradition and no real recent ties to the ACC, Saturday’s game in many ways will be like a non-league road game. Notre Dame hasn’t won a non-league road game since 2008 when it stopped in Los Angeles on the way to the EA Sports Maui Invitational and pulled away late to escape with an 11-point win over Loyola Marymount. The Irish are 5-7 in the 12 true non-league road games during Brey’s 14 seasons.

One of those arrived earlier this season in the Big Ten/ACC Challenge – a 98-93 loss at Iowa. It’s that night in Iowa City, and subsequent solid efforts at two semi-neutral sites (Bankers Life Fieldhouse against Indiana and Madison Square Garden against No. 3 Ohio State) that offer the Irish confidence for the ACC road challenge.

“We have tested ourselves in atmospheres like this,” Brey said. “We’ve got to be ready to feel a lot of venom when we go into a lot of these places because we’ve just not been to their town.”

The Irish aim to bounce back from a sluggish effort Tuesday in a home loss to North Carolina State. Coming off the historic victory over Duke in its first ACC game, Notre Dame did little right three nights later before dropping to 1-1 in the league, 10-5 overall in a seven-point loss to the Wolfpack.

The Irish couldn’t build on their league opener because they couldn’t get out of their own way again to start the second half. A three-point halftime deficit ballooned to nine in less than four minutes after they couldn’t carry out the little tasks – rebound, defend, protect the ball, make good, sound decisions – that make the difference between Brey’s coveted one-game league win streak and picking up the pieces.

“We put ourselves in a hole and that’s something we can’t do in this league,” said junior captain Pat Connaughton. “Anybody can beat anybody. We need to focus on the defense, the rebounding, all the little things.

“We’ve got to go to Atlanta focused and ready to make those plays at the beginning of the game.”

The Irish have to do it knowing that the effort and energy that they rode so well in moving and cutting and competing in the second half of the Duke game has to be there for a full 40 minutes. Especially for a team still trying to figure out who they are and what they can be. The group has grown tired of talking about what might have been had leading scorer Jerian Grant not been kicked out of school at the end of the fall semester for an academic violation, but it also remains the proverbial work in progress of nine available players trying to sort it all out.

“We’re really not thinking about (Grant) too much anymore because we can’t,” said senior captain Eric Atkins. “We really don’t have much room for error when we play.”

Regardless of where they play.