Monday, February 26, 2007
Sherron Collins’ teammates could tell that he was nervous.
Usually, the freshman guard is one of the most energetic players in the training room, joking with teammates and bouncing around while Lil’ Wayne blares from his iPod. On Saturday, he sat silently on the table while the trainers applied athletic tape.
Collins said he was feeling the butterflies in the hours before the game, which he started in place of injured guard Russell Robinson. If his nerves affected his play, it wasn’t reflected in the final statistics. Kansas defeated Iowa State 89-52 as Collins tallied 12 points and 6 assists in a career-high 32 minutes.
“I knew I was going to get a lot more minutes,” he said. “I just tried to come out and not do too much.”
As he sat in the locker room, some of the veteran players came up to Collins and offered him advice. Robinson, a junior, told him to play like he would if he were coming off the bench. Sophomore forward Julian Wright echoed that thought.
“I just told him to move the ball around, keep playing and be aggressive,” Wright said. “Basically, just play the first few minutes and get into a flow.”
Collins was helped out by the Iowa State offense, which failed to protect the ball. That allowed him to get a pair of early steals and run a fast-break offense.
Things were going so well for Collins that coach Bill Self left him in for the first 16 minutes of the game, rare for a point guard and even rarer for a freshman. Collins didn’t fatigue, consistently making his signature layups and running back to position himself on defense.
Sophomore guard Mario Chalmers and junior guard Rodrick Stewart also pitched in for Robinson. Chalmers finished with a game-high 18 points. The focus was on Collins, though, who knew he would also have to assume some of Robinson’s demeanor. Iowa State coach Greg McDermott said that while scouting the Jayhawks, he noticed Robinson’s leadership abilities.
“I felt that he was the glue that held them together, because he did so many things that didn’t show up on the stat sheet,” McDermott said. “They were very effective and unselfish without him today.”
Collins said that now that he had experience as a starter in a conference game, he’d be more comfortable with it in the future.
The nerves weren’t limited to playing basketball. He got another surprise when, as the last player introduced, he found himself in the middle of the team huddle in the seconds before the game.
“I just let them know it was an important game and that we needed this game,” he said. “The cuss words I won’t say right now.”
Despite his success, there’s one area where he’ll never be able to fill Robinson’s shoes.
“When Russell comes out, the whole crowd is going to yell, ‘New-YORK, New-YORK,’” Collins said. “Nobody’s going to yell ‘Chicago, Illinois.’”
Kansan senior sportswriter Michael Phillips can be contacted at mphillips@kansan.com.
— Edited by Ashley Thompson
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