Hunter Dickinson enjoys first Late Night in the Phog as a Kansas basketball player
LAWRENCE — Hunter Dickinson had been looking forward to opportunities to experience Allen Fieldhouse with a raucous crowd all offseason.
Dickinson, a center who started his college career at Michigan, transferred to Kansas basketball after the end of last season. In doing so, he gave Jayhawks head coach Bill Self a critical piece in an effort to reload and chase a second national title in three years. And Friday, with Late Night in the Phog, Dickinson got a taste for what it'll be like all season long at the team’s tip-off event.
“Man, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a building so packed, like, for a dang Late Night,” said Dickinson, who has a chance to become an All-American this season at KU. “Like, it was just incredible to see so many people so interested in just the introduction of the team, basically.”
Dickinson wasn’t the only newcomer to garner some attention from the crowd. There were freshmen and transfers from other college programs who go their first look at Late Night in the Phog, as a player, too. But there might not be one whose arrival that evening was as highly anticipated for as long as it was, or whose decision to join the program had as much of an effect as it did on the college basketball landscape.
Dickinson described being introduced as surreal. Overall, the experience was a joy for him. He even had the chance, along with veteran returning guard Kevin McCullar Jr., to introduce the musical performance of the night — the highly decorated Flo Rida.
Of course, the scrimmage Dickinson’s team had left something to be desired. Dickinson said they could have taken more seriously and that he might have been joking around a bit too much, and Self described it as awful while adding former Kansas star Christian Braun told him, “I wish I could be at practice on Sunday.” But as Self also noted the scrimmage won’t have one thing to do with how good of a team they become, and Dickinson is looking forward to playing real games in that building.
“I was thinking about it in warmups, like, I can’t wait just for the first game, for the first exhibition in Allen,” Dickinson said. “It’s going to be a special year and I think the fans are going to have a lot to do with it.”
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Jordan Guskey covers University of Kansas Athletics at The Topeka Capital-Journal. He is the National Sports Media Association’s sportswriter of the year for the state of Kansas for 2022. Contact him at jmguskey@gannett.com or on Twitter at @JordanGuskey.
This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Hunter Dickinson enjoys Late Night in the Phog with Kansas basketball
