On the FAU web today. A few words from Rex. He and his staff are hounds when it comes to keeping the players in the class room. Rex is correct about one thing. A good selling point for FAU is academic commitment to the athletes.




Coach's Blog
Written by Head Coach Rex Walters


May 14, 2007
Grades are in!!!! With the end of the Spring Semester, we are proud to say that we have five returning players with a 3.0 GPA, or higher. One of the biggest areas that we wanted to improve on was our performance in the classroom. I will put my basketball staff up against anyone when it comes to academic support. Coach Balado, Guin, Moore, Bauman and Leah Wahlgren have checked every class, met with our student-athletes every week, and provided weekly academic reports so that we could make sure that our student-athletes had everything they needed to be successful in the classroom. The biggest congratulations of course need to go to our student-athletes. I am very proud of all returned players on their classroom performance. Special recognition needs to go to Jeff Parmer, Sammy Hernandez, Enrique Rodriguez-Paz, Sanchez Hughley, and Xavier Perkins (all of them had a 3.0 or higher GPA). Congrats to you all on a job well done in the classroom! Regarding our seniors, both Brent Crews and DeAndre Rice have shown great commitment in getting their degrees. Both Brent and DeAndre are coming back for summer school in an effort to pursue their diplomas. I am proud of all of you guys, keep getting it done in the classroom!

Things have definitely slowed down since the school year has ended. The coaching staff worked very hard in April to make sure we identified the top players in the high school and junior college 2008 recruiting class. We have been to Dallas, Akron, Houston, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, and the Bahamas to see various AAU Tournaments. This is the first year that I feel like we are ahead of schedule in terms of evaluating the available student-athletes for the 2008 class. It is a never ending process and now we are on the phone with the potential recruits and telling them about all that Florida Atlantic University has to offer. This University is easy to sell….great academics, great university leadership, great facilities (with the renovations going on over in the Arena), great academic support, great campus, great place to live….I can go on and on about all the "Greats." It is easy to talk about what we have in Boca Raton. We live in ?Paradise?… life is good. I know that we (the Coaching Staff) can not wait until July so we can hit the road again to see our Recruits.

Until then, there will be some down time. With the arena renovations we will not be able to have our summer camps this year. We will come back in the summer of 2008 and provide Boca Raton with the best basketball instruction for its youngsters. I'm sorry we couldn't provide something for the community, but I promise that we will come back strong after this summer.

I will be honest with you. I miss my good old days of hitting the golf course to play 18 or possibly 36 when I was still playing professional basketball. However, I miss the feelings I have after big wins more! I may sneak out to the driving range to hit a quick bucket of balls, but more importantly I want to get to the fall semester and get back on the court. We will have our traditional 12 minute run (the players are not looking forward to conditioning) around the first week of school and will also begin our individual workouts once I feel our student-athletes have had enough time to get acclimated to school. I hope that time flies and we will be back in school and getting ready for the season. Until that time comes, we will be reviewing tape of last year, updating our playbook, and making sure that nothing slips through the cracks with the program. In this business, it never ends…and that's just the way I want it.

I hope you all are having a great spring and have an even better summer! Don't be a stranger when you see us around town.

Go Owls,
Coach Walters

i Hope we sign some serious players for next class...Rex appears to be seriously committed to building a program here...FIU has a very solid class coming in...they just got a 4 star PG transfer from FSU in the late period...we may have seen the last of the migette from last year...