When he was signed out of South Kent School in Connecticut, Papa Dia was the most heralded member of SMU’s seven-man recruiting class, having turned down offers from numerous schools, including Louisville and Oklahoma, to sign with the Mustangs. To some, Dia was seen as the player around whom the Ponies could build their team.

Averaging career highs in points and rebounds, Papa Dia is showing some of the ability that made him a coveted recruit in 2007 (photo by Travis Johnston).

In his first year on the Hilltop, he did nothing to disappoint, scoring 9.7 points per game and becoming just the fifth freshman in SMU history to lead the Ponies in rebounding, pulling down 6.5 boards per game.

But his sophomore season was as discouraging as his freshman season was encouraging. His scoring average dipped to 4.8 points per game, his rebounding average to 4.2. He seemed, at times, unfocused or disinterested. Dia didn’t seem happy, and head coach Matt Doherty began to question what Dia might contribute from on game to the next.

“Freshman year — I had a lot of drive,” Dia said. “I wanted to play hard, and show them that I’m a good player. Last year, it kind of went away, because there was a lot of stuff going on back home. I just crawled into myself — at one point, I was just … wandering around. This summer, I (talked) with Coach every day. That helped me a lot, and Coach had me talk with (psychologist) Deb Wade, too — I had a meeting with her every week, and we talked about everything, about how to channel my emotions. She really helped me. So there’s a lot of stuff now behind me that I don’t think about no more when I get on the court — I just go out there and have fun.”

“I wasn’t sure what I was going to get out of Pop this year,” Doherty said. “One reason we recruited Myles Luttman was because I didn’t know how much Pop was going to play for us, because after last season, it was like, can we count on Pop to deliver the goods? If I was a betting man, I’d say no.

“But he has matured a lot since last year, and it shows on the court. Myles is really a worker. He plays hard, and he’s physical, so Pop’s going to get pushed every day in practice.”

GROWING INTO HIS ROLE

The pushing is paying off. Dia is his team’s second-leading scorer, averaging 12.2 per game, and leads the team in blocked shots (25) and rebounds (8.5 per game); he has more defensive rebounds this season (116) than any other player has total rebounds (forward Mouhammad Faye is second on the team with 100 boards). After an uneasy start to the season that included a hair-of-their-chins victory over something called Huston-Tillotson and a split of two games with Texas State, the Mustangs suddenly are playing better — much better. SMU has won five of its last six games, and six of its last nine, and Dia has been instrumental in the surge. In the Ponies’ 70-60 victory over perennial Conference USA power Memphis had probably the best game of his career, scoring 23 points and pulling down 14 rebounds and dominating in the paint on both ends of the floor. In Saturday’s 66-48 romp at Tulane, Dia put up 17 points and 16 rebounds as the Mustangs cruised to the easy win.

There are a number of factors for Dia’s improved production, including the fact that he no longer shares the low post with former SMU center Bamba Fall, and the fact that he is now playing less power forward and more center, where his quickness and athleticism often are too much for opposing centers.

“I see so much talent in him, that I get frustrated when he doesn’t play to a high level,” Doherty said. “Last year, he didn’t play to a high level a lot, and his emotional ups and downs are frustrating. He could look great one minute and bad the next. But last year, I had other options. Bamba was starting, Papa wasn’t playing as much. But now, he’s the guy, and he’s more mature, and he has handled it better.”

But more than that, Dia said part of his increased production stems from simply growing up and maturing. Part of that newfound maturity showed over the summer, when he said he took his offseason regimen far more seriously than he did after his freshman season. After a lackadaisical offseason approach last year, he and teammate Robert Nyakundi became summer fixtures in the Crum Center this year.

“The summer after my freshman year, I really didn’t work hard that summer,” he admitted. “I worked, but I didn’t work as hard as I could, compared to last summer — I worked hard. I stayed here the whole summer. I worked out twice a day, and I worked out with Rob almost every day. He came and picked me up every morning. He told me, ‘I don’t care what you do — I’m going to come get you every morning.’ So every day, we were here, either in (the gym) or in the weight room, working out. Last summer, I worked on my jump shot, but this year, I worked on rebounding, my jump-hook, and stuff like that.”

Dia said the new approach in the offseason was due in part to Nyakundi’s prodding, but his former roommate said the credit for the increased offseason work belongs to Dia, adding that Dia wasn’t lazy before, but was one of several players who simply didn’t understand everything that was required to succeed at the college level.

“Not so much lazy, but he just didn’t know how hard you have to work,” Nyakundi said. “At this level, to be a great player … I think all of us didn’t really understand. Our coaches told us, ‘you’ve got to work harder than the next person.’ We thought we were working hard, but we really weren’t.

“So I think now he understands how hard he has to work, not just in practice … in the offseason, we’d come here three or four times a day, work out, morning until night. During preseason, he’ll come in here and work out at 7 a.m., 8 .m., and I think now, that’s really paying dividends and showing up in his great play now.

ANOTHER VOICE

Doherty said that one underappreciated factor in Dia’s development is the addition this year of Reggie Geary to the SMU staff. Although Geary was a guard at the University of Arizona and in the NBA, he has coached big men for years, including as a head coach in the NBA’s Developmental League and while working at the renowned Pete Newell Big Man’s Camp. Doherty admits to having been extremely demanding on Dia last year, and has backed off, often deferring to first-year assistant coach Reggie Geary, who works largely with the Ponies’ interior players. Geary played under one of the most successful coaches in the history of college basketball, in Arizona’s Lute Olson, and played professionally in the NBA, where he was a teammate of San Antonio Spurs stars David Robinson and Tim Duncan. The shift, Dia said, has been beneficial, both on and off the court.

Assistant coach Reggie Geary had to convince Dia that he's 'big-bodied banger who’s skilled,' rather than merely a finesse player (photo by Travis Johnston).

“Coach Geary really likes what he does, and he told me as soon as he got here what he expected me to do and what he wanted me to do and how hard he wanted me to play,” Dia said. “Even though he didn’t play power forward or center when he was in college or when he was playing pro, he really does know a lot of stuff. He had a long pro career, so he knows what he’s talking about. You know when he tells you something, he knows what he’s talking about, because he played with some of the greatest big men in the league.”

Geary said that part of his success working with Dia has been simply a matter of finding which buttons to push, but then came back to the same theme Doherty, Nyakundi and Dia himself discussed: maturity.

“Coach Doherty talked to me a little bit about how they approached non only Pop, but all of the Senegalese players,” Geary said. “I took that into account when thinking about how we were going to approach this. We didn’t want him just doing his own thing, but culturally, there might be a specific way you have to speak to a guy like Papa Dia. It seems they (the Mustangs’ Senegalese players) have a lot of the same characteristics: they’re not very confrontational, they don’t like to be ‘outed’ in front of people — stuff like that, so you just take things like that into account when working with them, and he’s been real responsive.

“He’s a year older, so that helps. He has aspirations of playing in the NBA, so once again I can bring up the fact that I’ve been in the NBA, I’ve been a head coach in the D-League, so I kind of know what they’re looking for. I can say, ‘this behavior is not going to fly,’ and he has taken that to heart. When he does something, I don’t have a confrontation with him, but at the same time, I’m not going to let that slide. So we have had maybe a little different approach to some things, and now that he’s playing well, he’s going to buy into what we’re saying much, much quicker.

Doherty and Nyakundi and the rest of the SMU junior class have seen Dia’s performance run the gamut since his arrival, but Geary’s analysis of Dia comes from a smaller body of work. Nonetheless, the Mustangs’ first-year assistant said that he got hired in June, he has seen a considerable change in Dia, centering around his intensity on the floor.

“Level of aggression,” Geary said. “When I first took the job, I watched a lot of tape on Pop, and he’s much more aggressive now. Last year, he would have settled for an 18-footer. Last year, he would have dropped into the lane, and instead of going straight up and drawing contact, he would have shot a nine- or 12-foot jump shot.

“So we sat down and watched tape. We talked about battling for inches and physicality, and making sure he has a physical presence out there, and he’s watching himself not be physical, and shy away from contact. He still does that occasionally, but I’ve been in his ear about that since day one. I was teasing him about it, I was banging on him, I was showing him exactly what we wanted out of him. He’s a skilled player, but he’s not a finesse player. I think he had it in his mind that he’s a finesse guy. No, you’re a big-bodied banger who’s skilled. So that message has been, since day one, ‘you’re a banger, you’re a banger.’ So now, sometimes he’ll start the game and his first move will be kind of soft — not very physical — and I’m in his ear. Come on, let’s go. We don’t let him slide for three or four or five shots. Now he realizes, ‘I’m a pretty big guy. I can throw my weight around, I can get to where I want to go in the paint, I can establish myself and be dominant.’”

Dia wasn’t dominant as a sophomore, and even when playing well as a freshman, the applicable description might have been “good” more than “dominant.” But there have been games this year when he has dominated. Against Memphis, Tiger big men Will Coleman and Pierre Henderson-Niles couldn’t keep Dia from scoring or off the boards … and combined for just six rebounds and zero points.

“Coach (Doherty) came in after the game, and he just told me, ‘this game should tell you how good you can be,’ because their big man (Coleman) is one of the toughest big men to play against in the league,” Dia said. “He told me, ‘you went in there and you played hard, you played good. This should tell you good you could be.’ It helped me with my confidence.”

One attribute Dia and Doherty share is that neither makes much of an effort to disguise his emotions — a trait that is fine when things are going well, but can magnify tension when Dia or the team struggles. Last year, those emotions sometimes prompted Doherty to ride Dia pretty hard in practice. With his new “leave him alone” approach, Doherty is able to get his message across sometimes with no more than a quick look in Dia’s direction.

“I’m pretty emotional, and Coach is really emotional, too,” Dia said. “So freshman year, he was really on my back, but freshman year, I really didn’t have no problems because I was playing hard, so he didn’t have to come after me as much. Compare that to sophomore year, when my numbers went down because I wasn’t playing as hard, and he really got on me, almost every single day in practice.

“This year, it’s kind of different, because he knows I react better when he don’t say anything. He can just look at me, and he knows that I know I made a mistake. He doesn’t have to yell or curse, because we both know I can’t do that, whatever I just did. He can look at me and tell me ‘don’t do that’ with just a look. It’s been a lot better, and he told me, ‘I’m not going to yell no more, I’m not going to do anything. You know if you’re not going hard, and you’re going to have to get over the hump and go hard every time.’

NOW WHAT?

After one of his first games as a freshman, Doherty told the gathered media in the postgame press conference that Dia had a chance to be “a special player.” When his focus waned last year, prompting a dip in his statistical numbers, Doherty wasn’t asked as much about Dia’s future, and said little on the subject. Now, Doherty and Geary both say Dia can reach the goals they have for him, and the goals he has for himself.

Head coach Matt Doherty has backed off of Dia since last year, which has helped Dia's performance and has brought the player and coach closer, on and off the court (photo by Travis Johnston).

“As good as he wants to be,” Doherty said, pointing to a collection of photos hanging in his office of players he coached at Kansas and Notre Dame and North Carolina who reached the NBA. “Troy Murphy and Sean May — and I tell (Dia) this all the time — he’s as talented as they are … physically, as talented.

“Now, it’s the emotional part. They were more mature players, mentally and physically, than he was, but now he’s starting to get there, too. He’s not there yet, but he’s on the right track. Pop still needs to improve in that area, but he has gotten tougher, mentally and physically. He’s coming.”

“He is a handful — he’s very, very skilled, in a big body,” Geary said. “When he puts it all together, he’s very good. I still want more out of him, and I know Coach (Doherty) still wants more out of him. I don’t want him missing double-doubles by one rebound. We talked about double-doubles at the beginning of the season. Double-doubles are big. Reporters see them, NBA guys see them. When you have eight, nine, 10 in a row — those are things that get noticed, and get people talking about you. He knows that, so now, when he has eight rebounds, I’m going to slide over to him and tell him, ‘we need two more rebounds, you need to be more aggressive,’ and try to motivate him that way.

“He can be very good. I asked him the other day, ‘who do you think you’re like?’ and it was Zach Randolph (of the Memphis Grizzlies), right off the bat. (Randolph) is a skilled, long-armed big who’s not super-bouncy — Papa’s not going to be dunking on anybody any time soon, especially at the next level — but he can operate with his size, he is skilled, his development in his face-up game will improve … so he definitely has a future. If he continues to work hard, and continues to listen to Coach Doherty and me, and never take his success for granted, he definitely has a future. I could see him being drafted, and I could see him having a good career. But he’s got to continue to keep working on all aspects. You can see it coming together. Now we just need it on a consistent basis, night in and night out. If he can do that, he’s going to give a lot of teams trouble.”