Since I’m transferring, my summer schedule is much different than usual.  The past 2 years I went to summer school up at Furman.  We took class, worked out, and played pickup pretty much every day.  I was home for 3 or 4 weeks before summer school and 3 or 4 weeks after summer school.

I missed the deadline to apply for enrollment in summer classes because it was before I decided to transfer.

While I’m home, I’m going to be working and working out. I have two jobs (this wasn’t necessary when I was getting “paid” $50,000 to play for Furman) - one is an internship with a church plant and the other is at Shane’s Rib Shack. My neighbor is the pastor at Grace North Atlanta and I’m interning with a couple other guys from the community. My job there involves helping set up for church on Sundays, “Sunday School”, youth events (Braves game last week, Six Flags this week), and pretty soon I’ll be leading a weekly Bible study.

I mentioned earlier in my blog that I was looking forward to working out with my brother this summer. Well the other day, my brother’s AAU coach called basically told us: You guys have to come over to the gym and work out with this trainer that’s been here. He gets guys ready for the draft and there are going to be some good players over here.

I assumed that there weren’t really going to be that many guys since summer school started for pretty much everybody. I didn’t really have high hopes but I wanted to give it a shot.

The workout was at 10. We left the house at 8:30, picked up another guy, and made the 40 mile trip to the gym. We walked in and much to my surprise, there were a number of guys that were there obviously getting ready to play professional ball. The first guy I recognized was Eric Devendorf of Syracuse. There were other guys getting ready for the draft/ overseas opportunities including: Marquis Gray (Michigan State), Rodney Alexander (Illinois), Dar Tucker (DePaul), and Tory Jackson (Notre Dame). Definitely better competition than I was expecting.

It has been a great experience so far and I’m hoping to continue working with them until they say I can’t. I was introduced to a conditioning drill that I hadn’t heard of before. Apparently it is a fixture at NBA workouts. Its really simple. You try to see how many lengths of the court you can complete in 3 minutes. The most I got in the 3 or 4 times I did it was 25.5. Steve Nash has done 33 and Chris Paul did 32.

The college workouts I did at Furman were only allowed to last a certain amount of time due to weekly NCAA allotments. This meant that we went hard for the whole time so none of our precious minutes were wasted. Something I noticed about this workout wast that I wasn’t completely spent at the end. We went for a good 2 hours but varying speed/intensity of the drills really made it go by quickly. I will say that when I found out the guys were going to run 3 miles I certainly wasn’t jealous by any means.

I’m heading to Athens tomorrow night and staying with a friend that is taking summer classes. My orientation session starts at 8:30 am on Friday. I’m just hoping to not get lost. The campus seems about 100 times bigger than Furman’s. Wish me luck.

The title is not referring to the temperature outside. It is referring to James Carr’s (WUOG Sports director) brainchild.  James is on 90.5 FM WUOG friday afternoons for the Friday Pregame sports show.  Apparently there is a rule that SEC athletes cannot be interviewed live on radio stations. Because of this, the Heatin’ Up podcast was born.  James is going to be interviewing Georgia players and coaches and the podcast will be available on iTunes and WUOG.org.

Last week, James interviewed me about a number of topics including my high school recruitment, the transfer process, and what I’m looking forward to most about the SEC.

You can listen to the podcast here.

I’ll be back soon.