1.He is the NCAA’s career leader in free throw percentage at 92.1%.
2.He’s not perfect – Redick wasn’t always so committed to extraordinary conditioning. He once was more committed to his social life. “I think a lot of college students, when they go through those first two years, they’re trying to figure out who they are and who they’re going to be, and I struggled with that for a while.”
Raised in what he calls “a conservative family,” he says he got to college and saw things he’d never seen. He did not avert his eyes. “Maybe if you’ve never partied before and you go to a party on Saturday night and have fun – in your eyes – well there’s another party on Sunday night. Should I go to that, too? You just kind of get caught up in what everybody else is doing.”
Eventually Redick figured everything out for himself. “It was kind of like, Man what are you doing? We’ve got a game tomorrow,” says forward Lee Melchionni “it’s sort of hard being in that place, but I needed to say that for the good of our team.”
“At some point, you wake up one day and think, ‘I’m not really headed down the road I want to head down.’ And I had that day. In mid-May 2004 he went to see Krzyzewski and spoke with him about redirecting his life. Ten months later, Redick was ACC Player of the Year.
3.Conditioning - “I was impressed with his physical conditioning,” says Texas coach Rick Barnes, whose team allowed Redick a career-high 41 points. “He’s like a mountain stream of running water. It goes up against one rock and turns another way – it never stops flowing.”
With help from assistant coach Chris Collins, Redick studied players such as Reggie Miller and Richard Hamilton, guys known for running defenders through an armada of screens. “Those guys never wear down as the game goes on,” Collins says. Redick averaged 36.8 minutes per game over the past two seasons.
