To find his shooting touch, Bryce Taylor needed to return to where it all started.
He left Oregon and went back to his hometown of Encino, Calif. for a month this past summer.
Taylor, along with his father and little brother, visited his old high school gym at Harvard-Westlake. Taylor shot hoops and rediscovered the shooting touch he missed much of last season.
“I’m a much better shooter than I performed last year,” Taylor said. “I think it helped a lot to put things in perspective for me and I’m just looking forward to finding whatever role I’m going to have this year on this team and just running with that.”
This past summer marked the second time Taylor has played in the Say No Classic, an NCAA approved summer league for college basketball players.
Taylor contributed to a team called “Hank’s Franchise Boys” featuring a lengthy list of recognizable college basketball players. He joined USC’s Nick Young, Kevin Galloway and Gabe Pruitt and UCLA’s Michael Roll. The transition from opponent to teammate was an easy one, says Taylor, who has known many of them since he was a kid.
“It’s cool to see how far we’ve come and how much better everybody’s gotten,” Taylor said. “It’s kind of refreshing and it takes me back to when I played when I was younger, just having fun out there with your friends and just playing basketball.”
The Say No Classic is more of a free-flowing league with offense more prevalent than lockdown defense. The laid back nature of the league, tucked away at West Los Angeles College, allowed Taylor to improve his game in a quiet setting free of the high expectations he shoulders at Oregon.
“It’s a really high-level but at the same time it’s play just the way you know how to play and have a really good time,” Taylor said.
Taylor suffered a hyperextended knee in early February, an injury that left him on the sidelines for the remainder of the 2005-06 season. Guard Chamberlain Oguchi emerged as a viable, even dangerous, scorer with increased minutes, and he exploded in the Pacific-10 Conference Tournament.
Taylor looked back and could only wonder how a season beginning with high expectations ended in disappointment.
“I never got a chance to really get into my rhythm and play the way that I knew I was capable of,” Taylor said. “For me, I just needed to remember to just play the way that I knew I was capable of.”
The late surge gave Oguchi averages of 9.6 points, 2.3 rebounds and 1.3 assists per game. Though Taylor was close with 9.3 points per game, it was less than his 11.6 of his freshman season and both his field goal and three-point percentages dropped.
This year is a new beginning, he said.
“I’m just going to try my best and fit in wherever this team needs me,” Taylor said. “I’m not really focusing on my own individual success that I may have had in the past two years because that kind of makes our team lose sight on what our real goals are and that’s for our team to be successful.”
The men’s basketball team is expected to use a quicker, more up-tempo style of play. Oregon’s quicker play will force them to play more bodies and allow everyone to earn minutes, Taylor said.
“The way that we’re playing right now – we’re really pushing the ball and we know that guys are going to get tired so that everybody’s going to be rotating in and out and nobody will be able to play for too long of a stretch at any given time, so we’re going to have to make sure we use our depth to our strength,” Taylor said.
[email protected]