As Casey Alexander was building his next lineup at Kansas State, outsiders often wondered what the common denominator for his recruitment was.
Alexander unveiled that in his second Kansas State press conference on Thursday.
"There are several, but above all else, I want guys that are about the team," Alexander said. "I wanted to make it really clear that I didn’t want any of these guys coming to K-State if they didn’t care or were not concerned about anything more than winning and being a great teammate and playing together as a team. It’s just not gonna work out well for anybody if that’s not their No. 1 agenda."
Alexander doubled down on selflessness as the biggest trait players must possess. Of course, he highlighted specific traits needed to play in his style of offense, but he believes being a team player stands above all.
"I’m not naïve to the fact that these guys are coming and they wanna be superstars and have great roles, and several of them will. But it’s not reality that 13th of them will," Alexander said. "There’s still a place for culture, there’s still a place for a locker room that cares about each other. That’s the reason we’ve won the games that we’ve won. It’s harder to do when you have a lot of new faces that don't carry over from year to year with leadership and things like that, but that was the biggest characteristic I was looking for."
Going from Belmont to the Big 12 is a big leap for the veteran coach, who emphasized the task of matching up with some of the nation's best regularly in the conference.
"It’s kinda undeniable that we’ve gotta be good at everything," Alexander said. "We've gotta have some athletes, we gotta be good on offense, we've gotta be good on defense. We gotta have enough size. So I wouldn’t say our mission was to go out and get big. But at the same time, over my recent career, I’ve kinda always aired on the side of size. Going from where we were at Belmont and the [Missouri] Valley, the physical nature of it, it was kind of forced upon us. So I still kinda have that mentality a little bit. Bigger doesn’t have to mean better, but all things being equal, it will be."
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