Steve Alford has a reason for reminding Bruins of their humble beginning

All these years later, the details are still burned into Steve Alford’s mind, a lesson never forgotten, never out of date.

He was a freshman playing his first game for the Indiana Hoosiers. What should have been an easy romp for a ranked Bobby Knight-coached team in its 1983-84 home and season debut turned into an ugly loss.

After the Hoosiers were upset by Miami of Ohio, Knight made sure the outcome would have a prominent place in the players’ sights and in their heads.

“We lost, 63-57, and that score was on our dry-erase board the entire year,” said Alford, now in his third season coaching UCLA. “And we ended up getting to the Elite Eight that year and upsetting North Carolina in the Sweet 16, and they were ranked No. 1 in the country.”

That’s why the score of the Bruins’ 84-81 season-opening loss to Monmouth last month is written on the whiteboard of their locker room and will remain there the rest of the season.

“I’m kind of just replaying that. That score will just be a reminder,” Alford said Wednesday. “No disrespect at all, because I think Monmouth is a very good basketball team, but we were upset about losing our opener. It doesn’t pave the way for a bad year. We can still make a very good year out of it.”

This figured to be something of a transitional season for the Bruins. They had enough players returning from last season’s Sweet 16 team and enough quality newcomers to make some noise, but their future seemed more promising than their present thanks to a stellar 2016 class that includes two five-star recruits, power forward T.J. Leaf of San Diego Foothills Christian and point guard Lonzo Ball of Chino Hills.

If the loss to Monmouth made them seem caught between the potential of the future and the difficulty of finding their footing now, Alford believes now doesn’t have to be a bad time. The Bruins’ 87-77 upset of then-No. 1 Kentucky last week and the many early surprises around college basketball are hints they should be able to compete with any team in the country.

“We love what we’re going to have coming back next year and the new faces we’re going to have next year. We’re all looking forward to that. It’s a very bright future, but this is all about now. I think we have a great team this year,” said Alford’s son Bryce, a junior guard who leads the Bruins with an average of 16.2 points per game.

“I think we’ve got a chance to make a run at another Sweet 16 and try to make it to the next step after that, and I think we showed signs of that [against Kentucky]. We’ve just got to keep getting better, and I think that’s what we’ve been doing the past couple weeks.”

Are they thinking too big? As Bryce Alford pointed out, skeptics counted the Bruins out last season during a five-game losing streak. They weren’t expected to get an NCAA tournament berth with a 20-13 record, but got in out of respect for their tough schedule and late surge. Seeded 11th in the South, they won two games before losing to Gonzaga.

“If that team listened to outside voices after the Kentucky game last year, we might not have won a game the rest of the year, with the way people were probably talking about us,” Bryce said of the Bruins’ 83-44 loss to the Wildcats last Dec. 20 during that losing streak.

His father — whom Bryce calls “Coach Alford” — likes the work they’ve put in since the Monmouth loss. They’ve grown emotionally too, coming back to earth after beating Kentucky to gut out a comeback win Sunday over tenacious Long Beach State.

“I want them thinking big picture but really concentrating on the small picture,” Steve Alford said. “At this time last year we were going through the midst of losing five games in a row. And yet the guys stayed together, they believed, and we were able to get to the Sweet 16 last year after a very tough December. We’ve started December off in a much better way this year.”

They face many potential pitfalls between now and March, starting with Saturday’s game at Spokane, Wash., against No. 13 Gonzaga and its outstanding big men, Domantas Sabonis, Kyle Wiltjer and 7-foot-1 Przemek Karnowski. “They’ve got a lot of big guys inside that really present problems for a lot of teams, but the good thing is we do too,” Bryce said. “It’s going to be a good matchup down low and our guards have got to come to play.”

As a team, they’ve got to remember the score on that whiteboard back home.

“Hopefully we can continue to grow, get some more wins going into the conference season,” Steve Alford said. “Then, the important thing is short-term just to keep getting better mentally, physically, doing the things that we have to do to be a tougher team to play against. And then we’ll see what happens. I like our chances. If we can continue to develop and grow I think we’ll be a difficult team to play against in March.”

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