The first step for Virginia Tech captain Erick Green was admitting he had a problem.
So before the team’s game against Boston College earlier this month, the junior point guard came to Coach Seth Greenberg with a confession.
“Coach, how can I become a better leader,” Greenberg recalled this week.
With the Hokies relying on six players who had not received significant playing time at the college level before this season, Green has had to take on two new roles: leading scorer and team leader. And like the rest of his teammates, who enter Saturday’s game at Maryland having lost five of their past six games, the two-time All-Met has gone through some growing pains.
“I’ve never really been a leader because I’ve never been somewhere long enough to lead and show people how it’s done,” Green said this week. “I’m not gonna lie, it probably took me half the year, just the past couple games, where I figured out what to do and how to lead these guys.”
Green has had to play catch-up in part because of his refusal to back down from a challenge in the past.
He led Millbrook High to a Virginia AA state championship as a junior in 2008, becoming the first school from Winchester or Frederick County to win a state title. But the ensuing summer, as he prepared to be a senior leader at Millbrook after committing to Virginia Tech, all Green heard was how “I wasn’t gonna be ready for college because of where I played. They said I wasn’t good enough.”
So he transferred to Paul VI Catholic in Fairfax to play in the competitive Washington Catholic Athletic Conference. He realizes now that playing on a new team as a senior kept him from taking on a leadership role before college.
It took a benching this season, however, to shine a light on those deficiencies. In a 78-67 win at Rhode Island on Dec. 7, Greenberg held Green out of the starting lineup because “there’s a certain behavior I expect of him as a junior leader, and he wasn’t fulfilling his obligation.”
“I was just blending in, not talking, and Coach was trying to get me to understand what being a leader is about,” Green said. “How I have to be there every day, even on the days I don’t want to be there or don’t feel like talking or feel like practicing. I still have to come because these guys are looking up to me. He taught me a lesson and it’ll never happen again.”
Green remembers his 24-point showing at Maryland last year as the night he came into his own as a college player. Still, he felt like an unknown on the court among opposing players despite becoming a double-digit scorer.
“Guys didn’t even stop to talk to me. They just let me walk by,” he said.
That slight sent Green back to the gym to overhaul his offseason program, focusing on his shot so much that by the end of the day, “I couldn’t even lift my arms up. I had to get into a cold tub because my arms and shoulders were so sore.”
Now Green is shooting a career-high 48 percent and ranks sixth in the ACC at 15.8 points per game despite missing two games because of a strained Achilles’ and a sprained left knee. He also leads the Hokies in assists and steals.
“He needs to be a play-starter, he needs to be a play-maker and he needs to be a scorer, and that’s a lot to ask of one guy,” Greenberg said. “But that’s what we have to ask of him because that’s the makeup of our team right now, quite honestly. Are we asking him to do a lot? Yeah. But that’s also an honor.”
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