New Beginnings Abound For Andy Kennedy and UAB Basketball
By Steve Irvine
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA - June 23, 2025
Chance Westry was looking for a new beginning. That’s exactly what the former player at Auburn and Syracuse is getting in his new home at UAB.
“A lot of new faces, but I'm excited for it,” the well-traveled 6-foot-6 Harrisburg, Pa. native said last week after the team’s sixth practice of the summer. “It's a good new, you know what I'm saying? Fresh start from what I've been through and I'm just ready and healthy, trying to do what I can do.”
In this case, he’s also surrounded by a roster full of players in similar situations. Westry is one of 12 incoming scholarship players for the Blazers. No scholarship player from last year’s roster returned for another season in Birmingham. Only two players on the current roster – Ari Gooch and Evan Chatman – have played on the same college team. They were teammates last season for a McClennan (Texas) Community College team that finished 27-6. Only two players – Salim London and Lance Carr – are coming directly from high school.
Eleven of the new players are two weeks into their first summer workouts at UAB. One of the newcomers – point guard Ahmad Robinson – has seen limited work as he finishes rehab following shoulder surgery. Joao Das Chagas, the team’s tallest player at 6-foot-10, has been at home in Brazil during the first two weeks of summer work and should be reporting soon. Playing rotations and depth charts are for another time. Right now, Andy Kennedy and his staff are working on getting to know their players and teaching them what is expected in UAB’s system.
Quaran McPherson, a 6-foot-4 guard from New York City, has played collegiately at Nebraska and Northern Illinois. This is the first time, though, that he’s faced a blank slate.
“I feel like it’s just basketball at the end of the day,” McPherson said. “So if it was three guys that stayed here or no one, I would come and do my job and do what I have to do. But definitely I think it's much easier (to adjust). Everybody being new, we all got our own character, our own personality and stuff like that. We get to talk to each other, communicate and open up. So it's kind of good, we’re all just feeling each other out kind of thing.”
But McPherson said he has learned something of importance the first two weeks.
“We could be a good team,” McPherson said. “We just got to buy into the little things, just be more physical. Like Coach said, we're not the one of the biggest teams in our conference. So just us being more scrappy and playing hard, I would say that's going to be our calling card, (along with) everybody just doing their role and doing their job.”
It doesn’t take long to see that versatility could be a strength of this team. Outside shooting is a good example. Junior Dayjaun Anderson looks to be the best pure shooter on the team. The 6-foot-2 junior college transfer had 113 3-pointers in 33 games at Triton College in Illinois this past season. Obviously, he is expected to fill that role for UAB this season but the Blazers also have several other options, throughout the lineup, to contribute in that area. The 6-foot-8, 220-pound Chatman, who will share the 4 and 5 spots with Das Chagas and 6-foot-8, 222-pound KyeRon Lindsay, can also be a capable long-range threat when needed. He hit 43 3-pointers this past season.
Time will tell how that works out. For now, though, the work has just begun.
This is what Andy Kennedy, whose team is mixing in three days of practice per week to go with individual work and conditioning, had to say about his team after the first two weeks of workouts and practices:
On working with an entirely new roster: Oh, yes, it is (different). I am just coming to the new reality of, in our current situation, this would be more common than you would like to accept. It's just the realities of where we are right now. So there's just a lot of, I don’t want to say guesstimation, because how are the pieces going to fit together? That's why the summer is so advantageous to us. It just gives us a feel. We're finished with our second week, out of eight, that we can be on the court for a limited amount of time throughout the summer. It's been very, very valuable, even though we're far from our full complimentary players because of Ahmad’s injury situation and the timing of the rehab and then Das Chagas has not gotten here yet. He’s scheduled to get here next week. We’ve got 10 guys, I think you saw, they compete, they’re learning, they got a good spirit about them. They've been very coachable to this phase.
On his team’s versatility: I'm hoping that we've improved some of our perimeter shot making. I didn't anticipate last year us being as inefficient from three as we ended up being. I think this year we've just got more guys capable of knocking down perimeter shots, which creates spacing for you. And then we don't have a big bulking presence in the middle as it relates to rim protection, as it relates to paint protection. So, we've got to be versatile, we've got to be skillful, and we've got to be really good in space.
On whether he learns something new in each practice: You're learning a lot about guys. Some guys have been consistently productive, some guys have a good day, a bad day, which is to be expected. You know, I've said to you before, I think one of the most overused words in sports is culture. But we're all trying to create a culture of work, and they have responded just as exactly as I would have drawn it up, man. They’ve been where they were supposed to be. I've gotten good reports from everybody that they've interacted with. They're here trying to get better. And then we've just got to, through the culture of work, we've got to form an identity, that's what we're trying to evaluate daily.
On whether this is similar to a JUCO situation when rosters change yearly: The advantage, I would say, is we are getting some older players. Like, you know, we've gotten two high school kids, we've got four from the JC ranks, two of those four that were in their first year in junior college, so they're just one year removed from high school. And then we have gotten four-year guys, you know. We've got KyeRon Lindsay, who is at his fourth school. He's been to Georgia, he's been at Texas Tech, he's been at Murray State. So he knows how to operate in a Division I practice. He's been through it, so he brings some experience that you wouldn't get, in your analogy, as it related to JUCO. All of those kids are new. And then, you know, you got a kid in Quaran McPherson, who was at Nebraska, and then Northern Illinois. Jacob Meyer was at Coastal Carolina and he was at DePaul. Chance Westry was at Auburn and Syracuse. We have guys that have been through Division I games, as well as the daily grind of the Division I athletics.
On the opportunity to be surprised daily: We’re evaluating off faith and just off communication with people that we trust in the industry until you see a kid, day in and day out. It's just been two weeks that we've had a chance to be on the floor with them for a few hours. We've seen how they work, we've seen how they are in the weight room, and again for a group of brand new guys, I couldn't be more pleased. We don't know what we're doing yet, but I couldn't be more pleased with their approach. They've approached it exactly as a coach would draw it up.
On Chance Westry: Well, his talent is certainly there. His issue has been he's had injuries. He's healthy. He's moving with a sense of urgency. It's a conditioning thing for him now, because he hadn't played competitive basketball in a while. But he certainly has the size and the skill set to make a real impact.
On how often he has seen growth: Daily. I mean, right now, we're teaching the drills that lead to the concepts that hopefully put us in a position where we can execute. So we're just taking baby steps right now. Sometimes as a coach, you have a tendency to want to cover too much ground. We’re just trying to be very, very basic and fundamental as to how we want to approach the game.
On having time to work on scheduling and other tasks: It’s just part of it. We got our hands full as it relates to scheduling. It's not that we haven't worked at it. Our work at it has been probably the same as it's always been. People just push it back because they want to get their team set first. You're just not getting as many to tango, you know it takes two to tango. We have a hard time and for us too, normally you would have your schedule done, your non-conference schedule done by March or April. You could kind of finish it up around the Final Four. Now, man, we need a bunch of games, but so do a lot of teams because it just gets pushed back until you get your roster set and you're not getting your roster set until the end of May. It's just part of the process.
On the approach when Joao Das Chagas arrives: We can't slow down, he’s got to catch up. Yeah. There's some drills that we're going to do every day until they understand the concept, then we'll take the next step. We can't go backwards. You know, the train moves on. He'll have to come in and just get up to speed quickly on where we are and acclimate. I think he will, though. He's a kid that's got a great motor. He's got real size, which we desperately need. You know, we've got 6-8, 6-7, but we need 6-10. He'll give us that.
On Ahmad Robinson’s time table to being full strength: We hope that he can do some non-contact stuff when we come back in July. But we don't foresee contact until the earliest end of July, but most likely it'll be early August, just to give it time to heal.