Last season, Colorado's Evan Battey averaged 8.1 points and 4.4 rebounds in his first full season with the Buffs. His 2017-18 was derailed by a controversial academic redshirt mandated by the NCAA due to early struggles in high school (he repeated the 9th grade at the L.A. Center for Enriched Studies), a ruling that no doubt was frustrating for Tad Boyle and CU.
Battey faced more adversity in the winter of 2017, suffering a stroke that forced him to miss all basketball related activities throughout the spring of 2018. However, by summer, he was laying the foundations after recovering that helped him to an impactful 2018-19 campaign, which now he hopes to take to even higher limits this upcoming season, in particular as a leader.
Battey certainly is one of the more vocal guys on Colorado's roster. It's hard to find multiple moments in practice or in games when he's shouting, smiling, or otherwise doing his utmost to get himself and his team fired up.
"There’s two things we can control every day: attitude and effort," Battey said. "I just try to embody that with an attitude that’s always good and an effort that’s always there. It’s contagious. If you’re talking and getting excited and your teammates are getting excited, the energy rises. I do it for myself and for my team.”
Battey thus has worked to add an extra spark to a season in which there are high expectations surrounding a veteran Colorado Buffaloes team which returns to the court in 2019-20 the vast majority of its main producers from last season.
"It's different (this year)," Wright IV said. "There's more energy, everyone's competing — you all see Evan out here yelling at us, cussing us out. It's different."
Wright IV last year earned a frequent title from Boyle as being the team's "emotional engine." So far this year, Battey has done much to get on a similar level in terms of having a day-to-day impact on his teammates.
"One thing I like in respect to McKinley and Evan is that they’re great teammates," Boyle said. "They think of their teammates, they encourage their teammates and they motivate their teammates. They do it in a verbal way and the way they play. Young guys, or guys that are struggling, if they look at (Battey and Wright IV) and model themselves after them, we’ll be a better team because of it.”
The above video was captured during Colorado's 76-60 win over Norfolk State in the second round of the NIT. The crowd reciprocating to Battey the energy he constantly displays on the court will be a Colorado athletics memory not soon forgotten.
For Battey, the journey he's been through in college has given him a unique role with the Buffs as an underclassmen with the characteristic and on-the-court resume of someone much older.
"It's my third year on campus," Battey said. "I feel like my guys know I've ben around the block and respect me for what I've been through. They see how I am in practice — I'm in the right spot, I'm talking — they can trust that. I think my teammates have the ultimate trust in me and I have the ultimate trust in them. If my teammates want to step behind me or get in front and lead me, it doesn't matter."
