With a new coach and (mostly) new roster, UWM seeks to turn the page
Markeith Browning’s initial foray into Division I basketball last year was forgettable at best and downright awful at worst.
As a freshman guard, the Ypsilanti, Michigan, native saw what was expected to be a transformative season at UW-Milwaukee devolve quickly into a mess defined by team turmoil, Patrick Baldwin Jr.’s in-again, out-again status and, ultimately, coach Pat Baldwin’s firing after a 10-22 finish.
Browning suffered a broken right hand in November and missed 15 games before returning to average a modest 4.4 points and two rebounds despite being arguably the most athletically gifted player on the roster.
No one would have blamed Browning one bit for wanting to turn the page and transfer elsewhere.
Yet here he is, back for a redo in Year 1 of coach Bart Lundy’s tenure, one of just four returnees eager to make the most of his opportunity while also trying to impart some of the lessons he learned on his new teammates.
“You can’t take things for granted. That’s the biggest thing I learned,” Browning said. “College basketball is hard. It’s very professional and you have to be very serious every day when you come to practice and film session and all that. You have to bond with your teammates because you’re the ones who are out there together. You really have to click and have a professional approach to the game, because if not you’re going to get embarrassed every night. And that’s what happened last year.
“I know the feeling and I tell these guys all the time – ‘I’ve been there before, and you don’t want that.’ I don’t want it again for myself. So, I try to put some fire under our team every day to not have a repeat of last year. Because we’re better than that.
“And we will be.”
Four players return for UWM, 13 are new
Returning along with Browning are seniors Vin Baker Jr. and Moses Bol and sophomore Vincent Miszkiewicz, who redshirted last season.
Joining the foursome is a group of 13 – yes, 13 – newcomers of varying size, skill and experience along with an entirely turned-over coaching staff that features a couple locals in Milwaukee Vincent’s Jose Winston and Oak Creek’s Ben Walker. Altogether, they are focused on getting a UWM team that hasn’t posted a winning record since 2015-16 season back to respectability.
“It’s been over five months. We’ve been through ups and downs, I would say,” said Lundy, whose Panthers open against Division III MSOE at 5 p.m. Monday at the Klotsche Center. “Markeith has kind of seen it all. We had one team in the spring, had already lost a few guys before I had arrived from last year’s team and then lost a few more.
“We’ve got 13 new guys, a whole new staff, not a whole lot of sleep. We’ve made tough decisions when we’ve needed to. We’ve worked really hard through the spring, the summer and for sure this fall, and I think they’re trying to find some chemistry now. But we’ve got enough on this roster to have a nice team to play the way that we want to play, and I think the faster they can jell and we can find chemistry – there’s a lot of competition – and sort things out, the better we’ll be.
“But I am extremely, extremely optimistic on what this team can do and the character and the will to win, and I think they can surprise a whole lot of people.”
Browning, a 6-foot-4, 196-pounder, opened Lundy’s eyes during the Panthers’ open workout at the Klotsche Center in mid-October by taking the ball off a teammate’s head in the lane and then leaping and dunking over him – a spectacular feat by any measure.
"That's the best dunk I've ever seen," Lundy said incredulously.
Bart Lundy brings new style to Panthers
Lundy, owner of a .696 winning percentage in his 20 years as a head coach (433-189 at Division I High Point and Division II Queens University of Charlotte), grabbed Browning’s attention at the outset by implementing his own style of controlled chaos in workouts.
“The first day we met him he told us everything is going to be crazy in practice. Just, all over the place,” Browning said. “When we’re doing drills, everything is moving fast. You might run into your teammate or whatever and sometimes I’m just like, ‘Man, can we clean this up a little bit?’ But it prepares you, because everything can’t go your way.
“You’ve got to figure out how to get around and make it work.”
The Panthers were unable to do that often enough last season, often playing too tight, making myriad mental mistakes and then unraveling from there en route to a ninth-place finish in the Horizon League.
That simply isn’t going to fly under Lundy, who should have the manpower to go 11 or 12 players deep and won’t hesitate to do so.
“Just having them get to know each other, finding out if they can co-exist and then learning to like each other, love each other,” is how Lundy described his team’s preparation to date. “Our (non-conference schedule) is really difficult. We’ve already put them in some fatigue, high-stress situations. I call it we tip their bottle over and see what comes out, then we pick it back up.
“We’ve kind of forged this thing through fire a little bit. But we’re still going. The funny thing is, every day if you asked me who played well today, it’s a new guy. So, I think sorting this all out with playing time and chemistry is going to be the difficult part. But these guys have really been working.
“We have high-character guys, and they’re talented.”
The roster makeup isn’t unlike the Marquette University teams Lundy helped oversee as part of coach Buzz Williams’ staff from 2009-12 – lots of long, lanky athletes capable of making plays on both ends of the court.
The 7-1 Bol is the outlier as the traditional shot-blocking center coming off the bench.
Otherwise, there are 10 players measuring between Browning’s 6-4 and Baker’s 6-9 with a couple in 6-8 forward Ahmad Rand (Oregon State and Memphis) and 6-8 guard Keon Edwards (DePaul and Nebraska) who boast previous high-major experience and could be real difference-makers at the mid-major level.
There’s another Division I transfer in 6-7 forward Jalen Johnson (Alabama A&M) and then five others from either the Division II or junior-college levels along with three true freshmen on scholarship who could fill various roles.
“Coach likes to play fast,” Browning said. “He likes to get the ball out and with the build of our team, we’re all athletic and like to go. It’s about getting more possessions than the other team and just giving ourselves the best chance to win. Last year we played a bit slower, tried to have more sets.
“This year we can just get out, play intense defense and score off that. Then there’s no need to play off sets.”
Lundy was asked about expectations for his inaugural group at UWM.
“None,” he said. “We don’t really talk that way. It’s coach speak, but we talk about doing today right, and stacking good days. That’s kind of how we’ve lived since I got here, and I think it’s paying off now. We have another philosophy that kind of butts heads with that, which is we want to be our absolute best in March.
“But it’s really, ‘Let’s do today right.’”
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: UWM starts fresh with new coach Bart Lundy, mostly new roster
