C-USA’s top scorer does it old school

TULSA, Okla. — Tom Penders wasn't being rude, he was just proving a point.

As the Houston coach was answering a question about his all-everything guard Aubrey Coleman, Penders stopped mid-sentence and simply pointed to the floor.

The two reporters huddled around him turned to where his finger was guiding them.

There he was, Coleman, the 6-foot-4, 200-pound walking, talking scoring machine, grinning from ear-to-ear with a basketball in his hand.

"I mean look at him," Penders said. "He's always got a smile on his face when he's playing basketball.

"He's just a great kid."

Penders is about as well-traveled as they come in terms of college basketball coaches.

He played at Connecticut in the late 1960s and has since roamed the sidelines for seven different schools, including a 10-year stint at Texas.

He's had the opportunity to coach hundreds of players, but none of them compare to Coleman.

"He's the best I've ever had — in my 36 years," Penders said.

Not bad regards for a guy that couldn't shoot when he arrived on Houston's campus in the fall of 2008.

"He used to take the ball from here all the time," Penders said as he positioned his hands in a shooting motion along his left hip. "And then kind of twist it around.

"You'll see sometimes on his jumper, he'll go in and actually twist it in the air and square up and shoot."

A few minor adjustments turned Coleman into Conference USA's most feared scorer.

His new form not only allows him to shoot properly, it makes him rarely miss.

The Houston native leads the country in scoring, averaging 26 points per game.

"I would bring it like this and shoot it like that rather than just shoot it straight up," Coleman said, duplicating his coach's impression of his old shooting motion. "So that was the only thing I changed.

"And the reason I changed it was because my shot started to go in consistently."

Unlike most new-age dominant scorers, Coleman doesn't use the 3-point line or the low block to get the bulk of his buckets.

Nope. Coleman is old school.

Coleman makes his basketball living in the mid-range, a la former Marshall great and NBA Hall of Famer Hal Greer.

If he has the ball and is some 12 to 15 feet from the basket, it's almost a guarantee that he'll stop and pop.

"It's easier," Coleman said. "When you get in the mid-range, you can rise up at any time and you can shoot it off the backboard.

"It's just easier for me. It's what I've been doing since I was at (Southwest Mississippi Community College). I really couldn't shoot threes — I worked on it.

"But from JUCO all the way until now, I perfected my mid-range shot. That's why I go to it a lot."

Being a master of one of the game's lost arts should reserve a comfy spot for Coleman, a senior, at the next level, but scouts suggest otherwise.

  NBADraft.net, the same Web site that projects Marshall's Hassan Whiteside to be the fifth pick of this year's draft, forecasts Coleman to be selected 52nd.

  "He tends to play with the ball, over-dribbling and then trying to make a play with a short shot clock," writes the site.

  Penders disagrees.

  "I know he's getting sought after by a lot of the top agents," Penders said. "Because I've been around and know them all. So I know he has a chance.

  "He's just going to keep getting better."

  Penders calls him the best he's ever had. Contrary to the way the league voted, I call Coleman the C-USA Player of the Year.

Andrew Ramspacher can be contacted at ramspacher@marshall.edu.