Until last week, Michigan strength coach Jon Sanderson had never had a freshman touch 12 feet with his leap off two feet on the team’s vertical measuring device.
That changed last week.
Everyone knew freshman Moussa Diabate was an incredible athlete before he arrived on campus, having proven it time and again at Bradenton (Fla.) IMG Academy. Nobody — not even Sanderson, whose summer workouts have become legendary among the basketball players in Ann Arbor — could have foreseen what Diabate did in his first few days on campus.
“We’ve got some athletes … a lot of talent,” he told Michigan play-by-play voice Brian Boesch on his Defend the Block podcast. “Moussa is a really talented athlete, long. He’s a special athlete. Looking through my records, I can’t think of any of our players that touched 12 feet as a freshman. Plenty of guys were close. Glenn Robinson III went 11-11 and touched 12-3 before leaving and going to the NBA. Moussa touched 12 feet last week in our testing …
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“Our tester, the bottom is 10 feet, the top 12 feet. He touched the top of it the very first test. Any additional testing we do we’ll have to raise that thing up, put a box under it like we had to do with Glenn, Charles Matthews and DJ Wilson.
Diabate wasn’t the only one to put his wings on display. Fellow frosh and point guard Frankie Collins, also known as a high-flyer, also impressed.
“Frankie’s not touching 12 feet because he’s only 6-1, but he’s a high flying, really gifted athlete,” Sanderson added. “You’re going to see a lot of highlights from him over his Michigan career. To be a point guard at that size and go up and windmill, do 360s, throw it up and go and get it anywhere, not a lot of guys can do that at his height.”
For some perspective, Sanderson noted Collins touched 11-4. That’s where Trey Burke was after two years training at Michigan — he initially hit 10-11 ½ when he first showed up on campus.
For the freshmen, their initiation with the strength coaches begins with a mobility screen where they’re checking every joint of the body, from the ankle and hip — how each move on each individual — to the middle of the spine to find areas that might be deficient. They come up with “high level data” to figure out who might need more plyometric work or something else, and Sanderson comes up with a base template for what he wants them to do in summer offseason training.
“Then it’s plug and play. Moussa needs this this and this, so I need to make this work into base template of where I want to go with base model for the team,” Sanderson said. “Adrien Nunez or Hunter Dickinson might need something else. Maybe 50 or 60 percent of what we do are things everyone does. Some athletes have a bigger menu of individual stuff; some of more developed athletes. Eli Brooks, Adrien Nunez have come a long way, have less of those things. They have polished bodies; we got them strong. That shows we put it all together and make sense of it.”
The summer months are fun, and the freshmen are just getting started. But it’s a special group, Sanderson said, and they’re fun to work with.
“Great kids … really respectful,” he said. “They just want to get better. Isaiah Barnes is another of those athletes. Will Tschetter is bigger and stronger, not a high-flyer touching 12 feet, but a pretty good athlete that is probably more advanced in terms of weight room experience and strength.
“They all have little things I think we can help them get better, but it’s a really good start for where they’re at physically.”
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