Full speed ahead: Ford brings fast-paced style of play

STILLWATER — Travis Ford's style of play made Mike Holder a little bit apprehensive. It made his new players a whole lot less apprehensive.

Oklahoma State's new coach has embraced a fast-paced brand of basketball since his playing days at Kentucky under Rick Pitino and at all three of his previous coaching stops. But don't make the mistake of calling it run-and-gun. At least not to Ford's face.

"I get upset when people call it run-and-gun," Ford said Thursday after he was formally introduced as OSU's new coach. "Run-and-gun to me is you don't care what type of shots, you just want to run down there and shoot it."

Do feel free to call it fast-paced, full of full-court presses and traps and offensively flexible.

"We just wanna force a lot of pressure," Ford said. "We want to be aggressive. When people come in this arena they know it's gonna be a long night. We don't live and die with every possession, because there's usually so many possessions in the game. I want our kids to have fun and not have that pressure on their shoulders."

That made Holder somewhat nervous.

"In all honesty I was a little concerned about it because our history, our tradition, is built on tough man-to-man defense and Mr. Iba played a slower pace of basketball," Holder said. "And I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel here. But I think at the end of the day I had to just dismiss what the style was and focus on the person."

The OSU players, who met with Ford briefly before the 2 p.m. press conference, were as excited about the style as anything.

"That's what really stuck out in my mind, that he plays up-tempo," Terrel Harris said. "We kind of heard it might be him and we looked him up. It will benefit me. It will benefit our whole team. We've got a lot of athletic, long players and a lot of guards that can get out and run and it's going to benefit everybody."

In his meeting with the players Ford warned them that they were going to be in the best shape of their lives. Point guard Byron Eaton was running on the treadmill when he had his initial introduction to Ford on Thursday.

"He said 'You need to get used to that because we do a lot of running,'" Eaton recalled.

Ford's UMass team led the nation in possessions last season. So while it may not be easy to sell players on conditioning, it's easy to sell them on the opportunity to play fast and get lots of offensive opportunities.

"Everybody's going to have a chance to score and everybody's going to have a chance to shoot and everybody's going to have a chance to use their skills," Ford said. "If we have a game on Wednesday, I want people preparing on Monday and Tuesday being stressed out all day long thinking, 'We have to go against that press. We have to get back on defense. You have to watch their three-point shooting. They play three, four, five, six different defenses.' I like that mentality. I like being very aggressive."