Poole said he felt like the most ready 
freshman of the group, and it showed 
in those early practices. He talked 
trash. He was loud. He took every shot 
that came to him.
And he backed it up. Poole hit a 
whole lot of those shots — teammates 
knew right away he would have a role 
to play down the line. Beilein did too, 
but Poole had to learn to play with 
structure.
When Beilein culled the rotation, 
about a week before opening night, 
Poole wasn’t a part of it. Instead, for 
the early part of the season, he was 
resigned to the scout team.
In his year at LaLumiere, a prep 
school in LaPorte, Ind., Poole was the 
sixth man — a product of the talent on 
the roster, which included five-star 
recruits Jaren Jackson Jr. and Brian 
Bowen II. Even then, Poole estimated 
he still played more minutes than the 
starter at shooting guard.
The scout team — that was unheard 
of for someone with Poole’s talent and 
effervescent confidence.
“When (Beilein) first said it, I was 
kinda like, in shock,” Poole said. “... 
And then that hurt, for a little bit. But 
then I realized why I was on the scout 
team. I was gonna get up more shots 
and be aggressive and just hoop at the 
end of the day. That’s kinda what the 
scout team really is. It wasn’t as bad as 
people make it seem.”
Sitting in Crisler Center’s media 
room with a year of perspective under 
his belt, knowing how well things 
worked out, Poole can say that. At the 
time, it wasn’t so easy.
Poole is, for good and for bad, 
himself. That means wearing his 
emotions on his sleeve, and at first, 
this one was disappointment. The 
rest of the team could feel that he was 
unhappy. Beilein rode him, calling 
Poole out in practices whenever 
he saw something. Poole took it 
personally. At times, responsibility 
fell to Wagner, Zavier Simpson and 
Charles Matthews, who took care 
to make sure Poole was attentive, 
listening and above all, encouraged. 
Poole was too good — too important 
— for them to let him get down on 
himself.
“We all kinda knew that we were 
gonna need him,” Wagner said. “And 
he kinda needed to understand that. 
… We really pushed him to keep focus 
on the practice, even when it seemed 
like it wasn’t gonna have any impact, 
which is not true.”
It didn’t take long for Poole to play 
his way off the scout team. He got 
his first big chance on Dec. 2 against 
Indiana, when Matthews got in early 
foul trouble. Then he ran with it, 
scoring 19 points on 5-of-10 shooting 
from 3-point range. The fourth of 
those five — a pull-up jumper over the 
Hoosiers’ Zach McRoberts from a step 

inside the 28-foot line — set the tone 
for the rest of his season.
Poole, still, took risks. He took 
those deep threes (and made a good 
amount), ball-watched on defense and 
turned it over more than he assisted. 
One December day, sidelined with 
an injury and watching a practice in 
which Poole was playing well, Wagner 
turned to Beilein.
“Man,” he recalled saying, “this kid 
is really good.”
“You know what’s crazy?” Beilein 
responded. “He can be so much better. 
That’s what I see.”
“I probably have said that to many, 
cause you could see the talent oozing 
out of him,” Beilein told The Daily. 
“But knowing how he can be more 
efficient with his game. If you saw 
his assist-to-turnover ratios — you 
didn’t see the practice ones — and you 
saw his shooting percentage, you’d 
say, ‘He’s better than this. These are 
like, tough guys that aren’t very good 
players.’ ”
***
Beilein is a perfectionist, and every 
bit as stubborn a personality as Poole. 
Just days ago, he walked into a press 
conference and called the Wolverines’ 
performance at Selfie Night — a fan-
friendly open practice the team puts 
on in lieu of Midnight Madness — a 
“defensive massacre.” More than that, 
his system demands adherence.
Poole needed to understand that 
this 
wasn’t 
about shot-
making, 
it 
was 
about 
the 
little 
things. 
Watching 
film. 
Defense. 
Playing 
within 
the 
system.
“I didn’t 
know what 
a bad shot 
was, but I 
wouldn’t 
stop taking 
bad 
shots,” 
Poole 
said. “... I 
wouldn’t 
really 
lock 
into film as 
much as I 
should have, 
only because 
I was more 
thinking 
about, 
‘Let 
me 
show 
(Beilein) 
I 
can 
make 
this 
shot.’ 
Or, ‘Let me 
show him I 

can do this. Let me show him I can do 
that.’
“I was just out there hooping, but 
then when I really settled down and 
looked at film and started thinking, 
‘Alright, what’s a good shot? What’s a 
bad shot?’ And try to think more about 
the game without thinking too much 
about the game is where I found a 
happy medium.”
Nearly everyone asked pointed to 
either the Maui Tournament over 
Thanksgiving or the Indiana game 
a week later as the place where that 
medium was found. Everyone except 
two people: Jordan Poole and John 
Beilein.
Those games got Poole into the 
rotation, but that was about it. Still, 
the same issues existed, and Poole 
struggled to rectify them. For both 
Poole 
and 
Beilein, 
finding 
that 
medium took the whole year.
“I think that in high school, he was 
a really, really good player. Certainly 
the best player on his team,” Beilein 
said. “And, perhaps, it was very 
difficult, where he probably thinks, 
‘Oh, I gotta carry the load for this 
team.’ And he doesn’t. He’s got other 
good players around him. And then 
you get there and the pressure on a 
freshman, especially one as highly 
recruited, or highly-rated, to live up 
to expectations, it just wraps them all 
up.”
“I didn’t realize it until the end 

of the year that it wasn’t more like, 
he was picking on me cause I was a 
freshman. It was more like he just 
wanted me to be able to do this,” Poole 
said. “... As the year starts to go on, you 
realize that he just wants the best for 
you. He wouldn’t have recruited you if 
he didn’t know what you were capable 
of. I realized that later in the year, and 
that’s when our relationship really 
started to grow.”
Most of that adjustment was Poole’s 
to make. But some of it fell to Beilein. 
As the gregarious freshman learned 
to tone things down and focus on film 
sessions, the coach learned that Poole 
does well with positive reinforcement.
Now, when Beilein sees Poole 
commit turnovers in practice, he 
doesn’t get on him unrelentingly, 
instead asking the sophomore what he 
saw and working from it.
“As I watched him adapt, right, I 
could see that he was trending in the 
right direction,” Beilein said. “And 
it’s never fast enough for a coach, but 
I could see him trending in the right 
direction. So, I embraced that.”
That 
doesn’t 
mean 
Poole’s 
personality is gone — it’s very much 
intact and always will be. That’s part 
of the package, and there’s a notable 
upside to his personality.
Poole talks people up, taking his 
confidence out on the rest of the 
team. He saw himself as a leader from 
the moment he stepped in the door 

at Michigan. At the Final Four, he 
walked the walk. Beilein mentioned 
his “leadership possibilities,” but for 
Poole, that’s already a reality.
When he talks, people listen. It 
has been that way at every level Poole 
has played basketball, he said, and it 
was no different last year despite his 
freshman status.
“We use technicalities as like, the 
juniors and seniors are the leaders of 
the team,” Poole said. 
“But I feel like I was always trying 
to find a way to give us a boost.”
Still, he could get away with having 
a bad day last year. That’s not the case 
anymore. When you’re always on, you 
always need to be on. Otherwise, it’s 
noticeable, and it rubs off.
One day this year, Poole let himself 
have a bad practice. The rest of the 
team followed suit. That’s the burden 
of being the guy who calls Beilein over 
the summer asking to meet.
The challenge in front of Poole has 
shifted. Now, he wants to be the one 
pulling someone aside to offer help 
instead of the person receiving it. 
Yet, in so many ways, it comes back 
to the same theme, one that Poole has 
wrought through the last year of ups 
and downs — sulking on scout team, 
hitting that shot, embracing those 
cameras, calling that meeting.
Through change and through 
growth, Jordan Poole will always 
have the challenge of being himself.

Tuesday, November 6, 2018 
 
 TIP OFF 2018
5B

