Torrance Embraces Bigger Role in Sophomore Year
2/13/2008 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
By Scott Latta
UA Media Relations
Mikhail Torrance didn’t know what to expect when his roommate, Ronald Steele, approached him wanting to talk to him about the upcoming season.
The two teammates had been friends since high school, when Torrance played AAU ball with Steele’s younger brother Andrew. As roommates, the pair often talked about anything and everything, both about basketball and about life, so Torrance knew this talk could have been like any other.
But it wasn’t. Steele, after recovering from offseason surgeries on both knees, had decided to redshirt the 2007-08 season. Torrance was one of the first people he was telling.
“My reaction was I was kind of shocked,” Torrance said. “I didn’t expect he was going to redshirt. He told me to just be ready, that coaches were going to look for me to step up and that my time had come.”
Steele knew Torrance had been down about not playing as much as he wanted as a freshmen. With his mentor and friend now on the bench and in street clothes, Steele told him it was time to step up to a bigger role.
“I think he was a little bit surprised, but like I told him, my setback is his opportunity to come in and play,” Steele said. “We talked last year. He was discouraged about not playing as much and I kept telling him to work hard, and it just so happened that through my redshirt he’s able to play. It’s how things work out.”
In their first year of playing together at Alabama, Torrance had helped substitute for Steele as a freshman when the junior’s knee injury occasionally flared up, but he never was faced with a role as big as the one he would face this season. With Steele on the bench, Torrance was now one of three Alabama guards ?? along with junior Brandon Hollinger and freshman Rico Pickett ?? who would be vying for time at point guard.
So far, the rest of the Alabama team has responded well to the trio of guards. One benefit of having three different players who can play the same position, Torrance said, is the ability to give opposing defenses a different look at the Tide offense each time a different guy is playing point guard.
“All of us are very competitive and we all play hard,” he said. “Me and Rico are bigger, different types of point guards so we bring match up problems and Brandon is a great defender, so we all bring different types of issues when we run point.”
Another benefit of giving multiple looks at point guard is that it gives the Tide offense multiple options on how to set up formations, Torrance said. With Hollinger running the offense, Alabama can go with four guards and try to speed up the tempo. With Torrance or Pickett, head coach Mark Gottfried can use his point guard’s size advantage with junior forward Richard Hendrix and either sophomores Demetrius Jemision or Yamene Coleman under the basket to try to pound the ball inside.
“It’s a positive for us,” he said. “We know we can go four guards if we play a smaller team or we can go with big guys if we have to. If we have four guards we know we can speed the tempo up, and if the other team’s not doing well we know we’ve got the players to go down in the post, too.”
Torrance’s relationship with Steele has carried over from the Mobile native’s high school days to a college career where his friend from Birmingham became his mentor as an older, more experienced and accomplished teammate. Steele took Torrance under his wing from day one, Torrance said. The two worked out together, talked together, went out to eat together and, eventually, roomed together.
But things weren’t always so hospitable between the two. On Torrance’s second day on campus at Alabama, in a pickup game, they got matched up on opposite teams.
The game, Torrance said, was pretty much one-sided.
“Coming from high school you think you’re all that, and playing pickup the second day I got here I was guarding Ron, and it was so different,” he said. “He couldn’t really be stopped. He made 13 different jump shots and it was a welcome-to-college-ball moment for me. Ron’s not the type to brag about it, which made it better for me.”
Torrance chose to play at Alabama after being recruited from Mary G. Montgomery High School in Mobile, where he averaged 22 points-per-game as a senior. Virtually every SEC school, including Florida and Auburn, came calling, but it was Alabama ?? where his favorite player, Kennedy Winston, played ?? that was always his first choice.
Now he’s helping run an offense centered around the 6-foot-9-inch, All-SEC Hendrix. And with other teams recognizing Alabama’s inexperience in the backcourt, Torrance knows opponents are going to try to take away Alabama’s inside game and put more pressure on the Tide’s less-experienced guards to create offensive production.
“Richard’s having a great year and we have to feed off him,” Torrance said. “Nights when they’re going to double or triple-team him, we have to be ready to score when our name is called so our first option is always going to be Richard, but when our chance comes we have to be ready.”
Off the court, Torrance has assumed a leadership position in his second year on the Alabama roster, traveling last summer to China for 10 days with fellow sophomore Demetrius Jemison and six other college basketball players as a part of Reach USA, a Christian sports ministry that uses basketball to share the Gospel.
The opportunity not only gave the group a chance to grow together spiritually, Torrance said, but to get a taste of international basketball. He didn’t know it at the time, but he was preparing for a bigger role this season thanks, in part, to an international 24-second shot clock??an experience that would benefit him when he returned to the United States and found out about Steele’s injury.
“It meant a lot,” Torrance said. “It was a spiritual mission. I learned a lot about God and it helped me and Demetrius out both. It’s a lot more physical game over there and helped us with the type of game we have now where we’re running more, and with a 24-second shot clock, it helped a lot.”
As his roommate would say, it was just how things worked out.
