INDIANAPOLIS — The IUPUI Jaguars are down to six available players with seven regular-season games to play before the Horizon League Tournament starts March 1. Tuesday, the team's Twitter account posted a call for any eligible student to try out for the team.
The tweet, now taken down, said to try out you must be an IUPUI student, have sickle cell results, had a physical in the past six months, have health insurance and medical paperwork.
"Obviously, it's not ideal," said Matt Crenshaw, Jaguars head coach. "It probably caught a lot of people off guard."
IUPUI has been plagued with injury this season and despite a 2-19 record and being winless in Horizon League play so far, Crenshaw said the tryout has nothing to do with his team's struggles.
"The six guys that we have, they're fighting and they're doing a tremendous job leaving it all out there, so we're not really trying to disrupt that," Crenshaw said. "It's just more so that we're looking at somebody so we can truly practice."
Crenshaw said student managers and assistant coaches have had to step in and help the team run practice.
"You have a guy with a torn ACL, you have a guy with a hip that just had hip surgery, and then three of my young men that are playing, three of them are somewhat injured," Crenshaw said. "It's really just trying to be able to limit their load and put them as in situations where we can actually practice to help these young men. Nothing more, nothing less."
So far, Crenshaw said they've received about 90 inquiries to try out.
"We couldn't practice and we haven't been able to practice how we were conducting practice early in the year. Obviously, (the team) understood from that standpoint," Crenshaw said. "We've been trying to do things behind the scenes, reach out to high school coaches, reach out to different people see if they had anybody attending IUPUI and we just couldn't get any traction."
Now, with just six Jaguars standing, Crenshaw may get some help from the student body.
"It wasn't about attention, obviously," he said. "We want to be able to put these young men that are going into these games and battling for us and representing IUPUI, we want to put them in the best position possible to win the game."