Six hours before tipoff, Tommy Kuluz and Dillon McGowan are inside the PMAC, filling ice chests for both teams and the referees, putting jerseys in the locker rooms and making sure everything is up to par for an LSU basketball game.
“Got to make sure the coaches have what they need for the game,” McGowan said. “It’s a lot.”
Long hours dedicated to the team. Sometimes being called out of bed in the middle of the night.
The is life for an LSU basketball student manager, but they also have fun along the way.
“I’ve gotten out of bed in boxers, knocked out sleeping, gotten up, got dressed, drove to gym and worked out with a player,” McGowan said.
But what transpires before the hours of game preparation, equipment readiness and player training gives the managers time for their own fun — a behind-the-scenes basketball season among other managers from different schools across the nation.
Last week, the 19th-ranked LSU manager squad traveled by car to face then-No. 21 Tulane and play late into the night. They didn’t return home until 1:30 a.m.
“That’s the best part about it,” Kuluz said. “We don’t have the bus. We don’t have the plane. We take two or three separate cars. Like, for the Tulane game, we had to drive all the way to Tulane in the middle of the night after practice. We play, and then 1:30 in the morning, you’re driving back.”
McGowan added: “You’ll sacrifice some sleep to play in the game.”
The “manager games” are when basketball managers of universities play pickup games across the country. Scheduling can be challenging because of time conflicts, as best exemplified by LSU’s 11 p.m. tipoff against Southern Miss on Monday night.
Each game has two 20-minute halves. Student managers keep their own stats. Sometimes, the games become hostile, too.
“When we played Tulane, it got rough for a second,” McGowan said. “There was like one foul call, and we got into a discussion on how we’re going to call fouls. And then once we established it … I had one guy call a foul on me, and I just said, ‘That’s weak.’”
LSU’s team is comprised of 13 managers, and thus far, LSU’s manager team has been able to play two games and hopes to play at least three more to qualify for the manager games tournament toward the end of the basketball season.
Some players on the team have some basketball background, such as being a “lifetime manager” — like Kuluz, the managers’ head coach, was at St. Patrick Catholic High School in Mississippi.
Attendance for these games can vary with the contests being late at night. When LSU’s managers played Tulane, both the men’s and women’s basketball teams for Tulane attended the game.
“It’s cool,” Blakeney said. “All our managers work so hard and help us out. And we all have a good relationship with those guys.”
Scrimmages between opposing basketball managers have been going on for decades.
ESPN analyst Jay Bilas has been an advocate for the “manager games,” tweeting out game stories and befriending managers, he said. Though he hasn’t played in any games, Bilas has been a spectator for many.
Bilas recalled a game where former NBA No. 1 overall pick Greg Oden played with Ohio State’s manager team versus Maryland, who had former NBA first-round pick Juan Dixon.
“Oftentimes, the staff members will come in play, and the staff members played Division I or played pro … It’s kind of a good laugh,” Bilas said. “The games are competitive, the guys play hard and it’s just kind of fun.”
Bilas, who played for Duke from 1983-86, was good friends with the Blue Devil managers in college, he said. Bilas also holds a coaches clinic with an additional side program for the collegiate managers, or aspiring coaches.
“The managers were our friends,” Bilas said. “They were good friends of ours. You tend to get wrapped up in your own stuff, and you think what you do is so hard. What the managers do is really hard. Those guys are there way before practice and after.”
“They’re basketball literate,” Bilas added about his camp. “So they know what they’re doing, and hopefully it just adds to their base of knowledge and helps them out a little bit and gives them hands on experience.”
Ian May, a manager for Michigan State, began playing on his manager team in 2013 and heard another manager at a Big Ten school kept records of the contests.
Then in 2014, May decided to start tweeting out results of games, and eventually other schools in the Big Ten became involved.
“It’s a really good way to network, let off a little steam before the game,” May said. “We kind of know that we’re all in the same ball park. I was just in Hawaii, and I ran into the campus managers, and I was chatting them up. It was like seeing old friends. It’s a really cool thing. I’m glad to be the one taking it off.”
Kevin Pauga, assistant athletic director for Michigan State, used KPI Sports to rank managers across the country.
According to KPI Sports website, KPI ranks team resumes by assigning a value to each game played. The best win possible is worth about +1.0, the worst loss about -1.0 and a virtual tie is worth 0.0. Adjustments are made to each game’s value based on location of the game, opponent quality and percentage of total points scored.
As of Nov. 14, 36 teams are ranked across the country, which includes four SEC teams: No. 6 Arkansas, No. 10 South Carolina and No. 36 Vanderbilt.
The perks of being a manager shares an opportunity to play competitive basketball for aspiring coaches and wielding a towel or shoveling passes to players each day at practice, McGowan said.
“It’s like everybody who is a professional analyst, or scout, or player personnel guy in the front office of an NBA team or a college head coach,” McGowan said. “Anytime you see someone successful and they’re in a higher position and you hear they were a manager … It tells you’re on the right path.”

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Caroline Magee

LSU basketball managers wrap up practice on Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2016 in the basketball practice facility.