Don't Put Me In, Coach: My Incredible NCAA Journey From The End Of The Bench To The End Of The Bench

by Mark Titus

woke up on the morning of August 28, 2009, in Windsor, Ontario, with groggy eyes and a pesky morning wood I couldn’t seem to get rid of.

In other words, we were going with the “if he’s black play back and if he’s white play tight” philosophy, which is unquestionably the greatest defensive strategy in the history of basketball

I calmly explained that the reason I never followed my shot was because I expected the ball to go through the basket every time I shot it. (This was always my pet peeve with coaches—no good shooter in the history of the game ever consistently ran toward the basket as soon as he shot the ball.)

willing to look past all of that because what really mattered was that we assaulted those kids as a team. When Jamar noticed that Daequan was having trouble making a kid’s face bleed, he showed Daequan that he had his back by connecting a vicious right hook to the kid’s schnoz. And when Jamar failed to knock another nerd completely unconscious, Daequan returned the favor and put the kid’s lights out. Meanwhile, I filled in wherever I could and used my Ultimate Warrior Wrestling Buddy to blindside as many people as possible. It was the kind of teamwork that would have made any coach proud. And just so we’re clear, what I wrote in this paragraph is only a slight exaggeration of what actually happened.