For the first time since their trip to Spain in the summer of 2016, the Arkansas basketball team is set to take their talents overseas later this week.
The NCAA allows its universities one international trip every four years, though recent years have been postponed for all teams due to COVID-19, resulting in more than 50 NCAA teams planning preseason trips this summer.
With precautions and protocols in place, head coach Eric Musselman and his team will depart Saturday for Europe, where the Razorbacks will play four games against four different European teams over the course of their 11-day trip. They will make their journey home on August 16 after stops in Valencia and Madrid in Spain and Milan and Lake Como in Italy.
This all sounds like an exciting adventure, but what does it really mean for Arkansas basketball players and staff?
Change of life on a personal and team level
First of all, this trip offers a life-changing experience for everyone involved. They will have the opportunity to tour world-renowned cities and learn more about Spanish and Italian history and society.
Musselman says the team“You will use this opportunity to learn from and about different cultures and just get a better view of the world in general.”
As a group, the team will visit four different cities in Spain and Italy and will have many opportunities to network outside of the basketball court. This journey gives players the opportunity to grow on a personal level that extends beyond the pitch, continuing the team-building process for a team that has 11 newcomers.
“I think this team has come a long way in a very short amount of time, especially with the idea that there are only two returners,” Musselman said. “I think the 11 new guys have done a great job of linking up on their own away from the coaching staff.”
For a team that lost 87% of its total points and 84% of its total minutes played since last season — both high marks for Musselman during his time in Arkansas — the time spent bonding on this trip could really take them what higher this season.
Opportunity for change of season
The ride also offers plenty of on-pitch upgrades. Even before embarking on their international tour, the Razorbacks have been granted 10 extra days of practice – the usual amount awarded by the NCAA to teams planning international travel.
with his innovative and unique approach to practice, preparation and exercises, you can be sure that Coach Musselman and his staff are making the most of these 10 extra days. The clip below illustrates their creativity, as the Hogs use an unusual tool to improve their go-go and lob passes.
Arkansas has been using FIBA basketballs and a 24-second shot clock during its exercises in preparation for the rules it will face abroad. The Razorbacks have also turned off the gym’s air conditioning with the expectation that the gyms awaiting them in Europe will also be air-conditioned.
Once they arrive in Spain, this newly built roster will face a challenge they haven’t seen yet as a team: a fight against someone not wearing a Razorback jersey.
“The 10 pre-trip practices are going to be really beneficial for us, but the games are going to be, too,” Musselman said. “I’ve been part of a couple of these, one with the state of Arizona when we went to China, and then in Nevada, we went to Costa Rica. I thought it benefited the players… It’s good for everyone to have chemistry on the pitch.”
Going out on the pitch together will prove valuable in building chemistry between the players, but it will also give Musselman and his staff a better understanding of their roster and schemes on both sides of the ball at an early stage.
“It’s really good for coaches to be able to play different rotations and look for different combinations, both offensively and defensively,” Musselman said of how the trip will benefit his staff. “It forces you to have a lot more things laid out schematically knowing you have four games to come.”
Each of the past two seasons has been marred by a losing streak early in the season followed by a massive turnaround that led to a winning streak heading into the postseason. It’s possible that the chemistry created during this preseason trip will help speed up the learning process and maybe prevent those early-season struggles altogether.
About the Razorbacks Competition
Here is the schedule for Arkansas in Europe:
- August 9 | Valencia Selection | Valencia, Spain | 12:30 p.m. Central Time
- August 11 | Barcelona All-Star | Barcelona, Spain | 1:30 p.m. Central Time
- August 13 | Basket Orange1 Bassano | Lake Como, Italy | 12:30 a.m. Central Time
- August 15 | Bakken Bears | Lake Como, Italy | 12:30 p.m. Central Time
His first game is against the Valencia Selection, a select team from Valencia. Like the select US teams that compete in international competition, this team will likely be a compilation of the best players in the area.
The Razorbacks will then travel to Barcelona to play the Barcelona All-Estrella (Barcelona All-Stars). Although little information is available about this team, its name indicates that it will likely be a combination of local professionals who are not currently playing for FC Barcelona, the main basketball organization in the city. If the national league La Liga is considered the Spanish version of the NBA, then this team could be compared to the equivalent of an All Star team from the Spanish G-League.
The Razorbacks’ last two games will be played in Lake Como, Italy, the first against Orange1 Basket Bassano. This is more or less a youth program designed to turn young talents in Italy into professional basketball players. They have multiple teams based on age ranging from U-20 to U-14.
Finally, the Razorbacks will face the Bakken Bears, a historical power of the Basketball, the main national basketball league in Denmark. The Bears have won the Basketliga title a league record 20 times, and have won 11 danish cups. This could be the biggest test of the trip for the new Hogs considering the Bears’ average height of 6-foot-5 and their record of success.
Interestingly, one of the players Arkansas will face in that final game is skyler bowlinga Paragould native who went to Greene County Tech. He has played for several teams overseas since finishing his college career at Missouri Southern State in 2011 and recently signed with Bakken.
Unlike regular-season games, Musselman said he and staff won’t be scouting these teams ahead of time, but instead will use the footage from these games as a teaching tool after the fact.
“Our exploration will be postgame,” Musselman said. “We’ll take the movie and train our guys on the movie that we have… I’ll go into every game with a script of a rotation and we’ll go in with a script of what we want to execute offensively. . Then the last five, six, seven minutes, maybe at that point we’ll adjust, but I don’t think we’ll make a lot of adjustments.”
How to watch Arkansas basketball in Europe
All four international games will be broadcast on FloSports, a subscription service that previously broadcast a pair of early-season events related to Arkansas baseball. Yes Yes, we know it’s not idealBut it’s better than nothing.
The service costs $30 per month or $150 per year. FloSports advertises the last of those options at $12.50 per month, but if you buy that plan, you’ll be charged the $150 per year upfront.
Success story after international travel
Years ago, when Musselman was the head coach of the Nevada Wolf Pack, he took his team on an international trip to Costa Rica. Like the Hogs’ upcoming trip, the goal of that trip was for its players to grow as individuals and as a team, but even Musselman couldn’t have predicted the impact it would have on one of their best perimeter players.
“Kendall Stephens was 0-for-16 from three (in Costa Rica),” Musselman said. “I’ll never forget it, everyone was dressed right after a game and the only place we could meet was in the shower. We were all there and I asked Kendall if he would ever shoot a 3-pointer in a Nevada Wolf Pack uniform. He went out there and broke Jimmer Fredette’s record and was the all-time leading scorer in the history of that conference.”
While this impressive feat could be labeled an outlier on an individual level, the impact these trips have on teams should not be ignored. We only have to go back five years to 2017 to find the last time a team reached the Final Four in the season immediately following an international trip; please note that no trips were made prior to 2020-21 or 2021-22 seasons.
In the summer of 2016, South Carolina head coach Frank Martin took his team to Costa Rica, where they played two games. The trip was important to this team specifically because they had eight newcomers for the upcoming 2016-17 season, not far from the 11 newcomers currently on the Hogs’ roster. The Gamecocks went 26-11 that year (third in the SEC) and advanced to the 2017 NCAA Tournament Final Four as the seventh seed before falling short to Gonzaga.
The following summer of 2017, head coach Bruce Pearl took his Auburn Tigers on a 10-day trip to Europe, similar to the 11-day trip the Hogs scheduled for 2022, visiting Rome, Florence, Venice and Milan. . The following 2017–18 season saw the Tigers make their first NCAA Tournament appearance in 15 years. The next season after that (2018-19), Pearl led his Tigers all the way to the Final Four. Even though their international trip came almost two years before their Final Four appearance, the trip appears to have played a big role in getting Auburn back on the right track and back to the NCAA Tournament, as Pearl said the group “went to Italy as a team, we came back as a family.”
It’s also worth noting that the last time the Razorbacks took an international trip was in the summer of 2016, when they went to Spain for some exhibition games. After a disappointing 16-16 season in which they missed out on the NCAA Tournament, Arkansas used the trip to prepare for what turned out to be a great 2016-17 campaign. The Razorbacks went 26-10, finished third in the SEC and reached the second round of the NCAA Tournament before a controversial loss to the eventual national champion from North Carolina.
Now, with back-to-back Elite Eight appearances under their belt, the 2022-23 Arkansas basketball team looks to keep the trend going by taking advantage of this unique opportunity to build on the recent success of the program.
See what Eric Musselman had to say about the upcoming trip when he met with the media last week:
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