The Toledo men's basketball program has added a talented group of five transfers and five freshmen to its program. The Rockets have won 20 or more games in six of the last eight seasons under Head Coach Tod Kowalczyk and will be looking to win another Mid-American Conference title this year. He sat down to provide his thoughts on the upcoming 2025-26 campaign.

What are your goals for the summer workouts from both team and individual perspectives?

COACH KOWALCZYK: I think our summer workouts are very important in this era of college basketball to evaluate our current team. We have a lot of new faces, and we need to evaluate them to see how they fit this season and for our future. Our evaluations will have an impact on next year's recruiting for what we really need, and we need to make those decisions now. I also want to really focus on getting better defensively.  We're going to have a ton of defensive practices, and we'll scrimmage a little bit too. We're going to install a lot of our defensive concepts and get better as a program defensively. The last component is individual improvement. I think the offseason is our time to improve the skills of our players.

Can you talk about the individual growth your players have made during summer workouts in the past and the impact it's had on the program?

COACH KOWALCZYK: I think one of our program's strengths has been how much better our young players get. You look at Sam Lewis last year, for example, going from an average of under four points per game to over 16 points. That's not just Sam Lewis. That's Ray J Dennis, Ryan Rollins, Seth Millner, JT Shumate, Marreon Jackson and Spencer Littleson. There's a lot more you could add to that list. They have all really bought into that grind of individual improvement, and with individual improvement comes team improvement.

With five freshmen joining the program, how do you incorporate them into the mix along with the five transfers?

COACH KOWALCZYK: It's early, so I don't want to make an assessment too quickly. I like what I see so far, but it's way too early to judge anything. A big thing for our freshmen is to come in and really compete, play hard, work hard and gain respect from our older players. All of that really impacts their ability to play as freshmen. This summer is a time for everyone to learn, not just for our newcomers. As coaches, we need to learn all summer long too, especially in this era of roster turnover. Being able to put some new pieces in and figure it out as quickly as possible is the key to the start of your season.

What are your plans to build team chemistry both on and off the court?

COACH KOWALCZYK: We're going to do more team bonding off the court than we ever have. We're going to take the guys out on Lake Erie fishing.  We're going to go paintballing, go-karting, and bowling. We're also heading to a quarry as well as to my lake house twice. We're going to have at least one team activity every week to get our guys to spend time together away from the court and away from basketball.

What is the most important area you need to improve in from last year?

COACH KOWALCZYK: Our defense. We have to get a lot better defensively. Some of that is changing the players on our roster and some of it is changing our schemes as well. We need to do a better job of instilling a defensive mentality on all our incoming guys. We did a bad job with that last year.

What are you looking to improve in on the offensive end?

COACH KOWALCZYK: We have to improve our three-point shooting. We also need to move the ball and space the floor better. I think we're heading in that direction with the additions we've made to our roster.

Can you assess the transfer portal and the effect it has had on your program?

COACH KOWALCZYK: The transfer portal as a whole has been really good for our program. We have had far more success than failures, but last year didn't work out as well for a variety of reasons. I think we've done the right things to acknowledge why and corrected it. Now we are moving forward and getting better after learning from our mistakes.

How does having two former players (RayJ Dennis, Ryan Rollins) on NBA rosters this past season help the program in recruiting?

COACH KOWALCZYK: I tell our recruits all the time that I'm the only head coach calling them from a program that has had two NBA guards in the last three years. It speaks volumes of Toledo basketball. It speaks volumes of where our program has been. It clearly speaks volumes for our player development.