How NC State Basketball built team chemistry and discipline at a summer camp with no cell service and Navy SEALS

With the new NIL and transfer rules, rosters are turning over on a yearly basis, and building team chemistry is harder than ever.

It’s even harder when you have a brand new coach on top of all that churn.

Will Wade was one of the highest-profile hires of the offseason in college basketball, and he’s being tasked with turning around an NC State program that has UNC and Duke in their backyard. A program that has really played second fiddle for the past 40+ years.

I would have been easy for Wade to come in and pump the brakes and ask the fanbase for time to get acclimated and begin to build a program. Instead, he trademarked the phrase ‘Red Reckoning” and fired a warning shot to the ACC blue bloods that this isn’t the NC State you’re used to.

Now, obvioiusly the media ate it up and the fans loved it, but how in the heck does a guy assemble a staff, a roster, and change the entire culture around a program in 6 months?

Well, Wade discussed that exact thing in his presser on Monday, explaining the teams recent ‘no cell phone retreat’, complete with NAVY SEAL training.

 

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“We got there Friday. No cell phone reception, except you’ve got Wifi in the camp mess hall. The bigger part is our guys staying together, our staff staying together. We had a session that night were we went over our team goals and our team identity, Then we did a night session with the (Navy) SEALS.”

“Then the next morning we wake up and did a morning session with the seals, then we had a full day of programming. Then the speakers come in. We did some different things for our guys to get to know each other, for our staff to get to know each other. We did all that on the day on Saturday. Then at night we divided up into teams and we did a hostage type of mission where we all had to work together for about two ours.”

“Then on Sunday, we did another morning session with the SEALS, and we closed out our programming.”

“It was emotional. We had guys up there crying, talking about things. It was really, really good for our group. I’ve been doing retreats for along time and I have one staff member who has been with me on almost all of them. He came to me afterwards and said how do you think it went? I said I thought it went really well. He said it was the best one we’ve ever had. I said I agree I just didn’t want to say that.”

“We’re starting to build some fiber with one another. Starting to see some comminatlity which will really help us as we move forward here. I was very, very pleased.”

If you’d like to look at where the team went, it was Camp Oak Hill in Oxford, NC.