George Mason Coach Jim Larranaga aims to keep heart, team in check

Even before this basketball season began, George Mason Coach Jim Larranaga knew he was in for a bumpy ride. The Patriots are talented but young -- seriously young -- with only one senior, two juniors, three sophomores and seven freshmen.

"Not only are we going to have good nights and bad nights, we're going to have good halves and bad halves," he said this fall. "We may even go way up and then way down from timeout to timeout."

Larranaga probably never imagined the November and December he and his team would go through. There were close losses to Villanova and Dayton. There were solid wins over Creighton and Indiana.

There was also a health scare: On the afternoon of Nov. 15, Larranaga walked into Patriot Center prior to his team's game against Dartmouth and felt his heart racing. When Mason's team doctor, Patrick Depenbrock, examined him he told him the problem right away -- atrial fibrillation, an abnormal heartbeat.

Larranaga got checked out the next day by an area cardiologist and went on medication.

The doctor "said if the meds work in four weeks, we'll be able to shock you back into rhythm."

Wednesday, the day before he was supposed to go into the hospital, Larranaga received a different kind of shock. His team traveled to Radford, the defending Big South champion, and lost, 80-53. The Patriots were outrebounded, 47-29.

"If you get outrebounded [by that margin] that means you aren't even competing," Larranaga said, standing in the hallway outside his team's locker room Saturday afternoon. "You can't win basketball games if you don't rebound."

The Radford loss put Mason in a delicate position going into Saturday's game at Patriot Center against Old Dominion. Larranaga had to decide just how hard to push, how much to demand from a team still learning how to compete.

"The easiest thing to say when you're coaching a young team is you have to be patient," he said. "And you do have to be patient. But you also have to be demanding because you have guys who think they're trying as hard as they possibly can and they're not. You tell them the way they're playing isn't right, and they look at you like you're crazy because the way they've played has been successful for them in the past. But all they've done is focus on offense. That doesn't work at this level."

The Patriots actually put together 40 solid minutes of basketball against a team that is picked to finish first in the Colonial Athletic Association, a team that, in its last three games, had won at Georgetown and beaten solid Atlantic 10 teams Charlotte and Duquesne. Tied at 39 with 15 minutes 30 seconds remaining, Mason went on a stunning 26-8 run over the next nine minutes to build a 65-47 lead that never dipped below double digits during the final six minutes as it cruised to a surprisingly easy 71-55 victory.

"You have to take your hat off to them," ODU Coach Blaine Taylor said. "They were coming off a tough loss and they came out with a lot of energy. They played very physical and they really shot the ball."