PITTSBURGH – Notre Dame’s Zach Auguste showed off his off-season development with 25 points in a 69-65 win over Northeastern in the second round of the NCAA tournament.
Where was the source for that development? In gyms – for multiple sports – throughout the Huskies’ home of Boston.
Auguste, a 6-10 center for the Fighting Irish, has the Greater Boston Area in his blood.
The half Greek junior was born in Cambridge before moving around different parts of Boston and finally settled in Marlborough when he was 7-years-old.
He grew up seeing Harvard, BU, BC and Northeastern play and those are the gyms he works out in in between seasons.
“It was kind of diverse,” Auguste said. “It was pretty much just all of us Boston guys just coming out working hard together.”
Kansas’s Wayne Selden Jr., BC’s Olivier Hanlan, Harvard’s Kyle Casey, BU’s Blaise Mbargorma, joined Auguste in the workouts.
The pick-up games also gave Auguste a preview of Northeastern center Scott Eatherton, who he went toe-to-toe with on Thursday.
“I was pretty confident going in,” Auguste said. “I knew a lot about his game, as well as he knew a lot about mine so we just wanted to go head to head.”
But matching up with future opponents wouldn’t be enough for Auguste to improve from his 6.7 points and 4.3 rebounds per game. Auguste also needed to improve his physical features and knew boxing could lead to peak conditioning.
“There’s a lot of mental focus in it,” Auguste said. “It helps obviously with my conditioning as well but I think it just uses the best of my ability, where I can just work on all of my physical features.”
So one day this past summer, Auguste, Casey and Selden Jr. walked into Peter Welch’s Gym in South Boston and started training.
“Guys were looking at us like at us like ‘Jeez, you guys are big,” Auguste said. “Other than that everyone was just cool with it.”
And now, even though he broke some Bostonian hearts by sending the Huskies running, Auguste still has the Welch trainers, Marlborough high school coach Illya Nicholas and his East Coast friends and family in his mind as he gets ready to take on Butler tomorrow.
Some of them are thinking of him too.
“It was a very big deal that they reached out,” Auguste said. “I was very blessed to hear from a lot of people back home.”
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