Oregon State Men's Team Back To 'Boot Camp' & 5:30 a.m Practices

CORVALLIS — The Beavers are back in boot camp.

Oregon State men’s basketball coach Craig Robinson reinstated 5:30 a.m. practices this week in hopes of shaking his team out of its current doldrums.

OSU, which takes on the Ducks in the second edition of the Civil War at sold-out Matthew Knight Arena on Saturday at 1 p.m., has dropped three straight contests, and six of its last seven, after a promising 2-0 start in Pac-10 play.

“I think in my haste to hopefully rid ourselves of the past, I moved forward too quickly,” Robinson said on Tuesday. “So, we are back to the old ways, practicing early in the morning in a more boot-camp environment.”

Robinson, whose first season at OSU was characterized by the same early morning wake-up calls for daily workouts, doesn’t view the switch as a punitive measure.

“I’m not doing this out of punishment,” he said. “I think we need the focus and discipline and the strategic mindset that boot camp brings ... a good way to rethink what you’re doing is to start from the beginning and work on fundamentals.”

The Beaver players don’t seem to mind, at least publicly.

They know they could use some type of spark to turn their season around, especially after losing at home to Oregon, 63-59, in the first Civil War at Gill Coliseum.

OSU is 9-15 overall and 4-9 in the Pac-10. The Beavers are 1-9 on the road this year with their lone victory coming against Howard in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 27.

“It was kind of needed,” said 6-foot-4 sophomore guard Jared Cunningham, the team’s leading scorer at 13.7 points per game.

Cunningham heads into the Civil War just one steal shy of Gary Payton’s sophomore steals record of 72 set in 1987-88.

“It’s not easy to wake up at 5 in the morning, but we were kind of slipping ... at times being lackadaisical and just going through the motions in practice, so to wake up early and do it right from the beginning, we need that right now.”