Four months have passed since fifth-year senior Dez Lindsay reached those glass double doors to the Ice Family Basketball Center for the first time, as the 23-year-old native of Louisville, Kentucky, whose hoops story took the unranked 6-foot-6, 215-pound forward from Louisville's Male High School to Florida SouthWestern State College and onto Oregon, sought new life, a hardwood rebirth at Kansas State in the Big 12 Conference.
It was a sight we had never witnessed before simply because Collin Klein, at the place he loves more than any other, has never experienced this exact moment as a head coach at Kansas State. His usual soft eyes at his weekly Monday news conference were hardened by a weekend of individual and team-wide reflection, from rewatching the sequences over and over again on his tablet while sitting on the team plane home to Manhattan after a 31-26 loss at Cincinnati, the first loss and first road trip of the Klein era.
Here Casey Alexander sits and 199 days have passed since he began this journey as head basketball coach at Kansas State. The 54-year-old Alexander wears a purple hoodie as he glides into an awaiting chair at the front of the team meeting room in the Ice Basketball Center, and he smiles and shakes hands, and Monday, September 28, has basically been like the rest since May 31, when he addressed his Wildcats as a team inside this same team meeting room for the first time. Alexander talked to his team about expectations and "who we want to be," and about accountability, and representing K-State well, and not being entitled, and not lacking self-discipline, and "making sure we get all that stuff right."
Collin Klein, who was the quarterback to lead Kansas State to its last 4-0 start in 2012, will try to duplicate the feat for the Wildcats — this time as their head coach — as they visit Cincinnati for their Big 12 Conference opener at 6:00 p.m. Saturday at Nippert Stadium in Cincinnati, Ohio.
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