Even in the first week of the season, Vanderbilt coach Mark Byington is cognizant of the grind that has started.
The No. 24 Commodores will have a likely uptick in competition in their second game when Wake Forest visits Nashville for a Thursday night contest.
“I’m sitting here after game one, kind of thinking about how many games we’ve got left,” Byington said. “It’s a long season. It is a tremendously long season. So on the journey, the goal is to keep getting better along the way and see where you are at the end of it.”
Vanderbilt rolled past visiting Bellarmine 93-47 in the season opener Monday night, with four Commodores starters — led by Tyler Tanner with 20 points — scoring in double figures.
“With us and with our team, the whole focus was we’ve just got to learn our team and get better,” Byington said. “I played a lot of guys.”
Regarding Tanner, perhaps more than his scoring, the Commodores like how his energy level creates positives.
“He plays so hard,” Byington said. “I thought he did a really good job of being really aggressive on defense and pushing the pace on offense.”
For Wake Forest on Monday, Gavin Placide scored 20 points in an 83-62 season-opening triumph against visiting Maryland Eastern Shore.
Point guard Kevair Kennedy gave the Demon Deacons 14 points, nine rebounds and eight assists in his first game since transferring from Merrimack.
“I think that he embodies a lot of things that I believe in … grittiness and toughness and relentlessness,” Wake Forest coach Steve Forbes said. “I think he’s about the right stuff. I think at that position, he’s got a joy to play.”
Vanderbilt, which will play its first six games at home, posted a 38-20 rebounding advantage and forced 23 turnovers in the season opener. Can the Commodores repeat that kind of defensive performance?
“We definitely feel like we have the talent to do it,” forward Sebastian Williams-Adams said. “It’s more so finding the want to every single day, every single game. We just have focused on that.”
Wake Forest forward Jamari McDowell is a transfer from Kansas, so he has been exposed to the types of power-conference matchups like the one looming Thursday. He said he understands the importance of the details that go into game preparation.
“It slowly adds up, and before you know it, it snowballs, and you have a whole bunch of either problems or you got a whole bunch of things that your team can rely on,” McDowell said. “So that’s kind of what we are striving for here to do at Wake.”
The Thursday game will be a rematch of a contest last December, when Vanderbilt built a large early lead on the road en route to defeating Wake Forest 98-67. Tanner finished with 11 points, seven assists and five steals.
The matchup between the Demon Deacons and Commodores will be one of two true road games for Wake Forest in the nonconference portion of the schedule. The other is a Dec. 1 visit to LSU.
–Field Level Media
