Couple of quick little nuggets this afternoon:

I must have missed this, having gone on vacation soon after the basketball season was over, but former UConn grad assistant/jack-of-all-trades Ben Wood has found a new home at the University of Rhode Island.

Wood, a graduate of Woodbury's Nonnewaug High School, is the director of player development at URI. He'll run the team's video operations, coordinate film exchange and opponent breakdowns and edits, as well as oversee the team's community relations program, staff of team managers, and serve as the staff liasion with the academic services office.

Wood, a 2007 UConn grad (and 2009 masters grad from UConn), was a well-respected part of the Huskies' program for the past several years. He started as a team manager as a freshman, became the head manager as a junior in 2007 and, after graduating with a geography degree, became graduate manager while working on his geography master's.

This year, he was slated to begin writing his dissertation and his professors told him he really had to fully commit to that for a year. Not wanting to get out of basketball, he looked for a job and, with a great deal of help from UConn associate head coach George Blaney (who shares Seton Hall bonds with new URI coach Danny Hurley), got the job despite never having met Hurley before the interview.

Everyone in the UConn program was happy for Wood, including Jim Calhoun.

“Before I had told anybody, he knew I had the job," Wood recalled. "He left me a voice mail that was very, very nice, thanked me for all I had helped with. He’s always encouraged me to want more, go for more.”

In his new position, Wood is basically like UConn's Kevin Freeman: can't coach on the floor, can't recruit, but can be in coaches' meetings, etc.

*** Meanwhile, the news isn't as good for ex-UConn star Charlie Villanueva, who was cut from the Dominican Republic national team and won't be with them at the FIBA Olympic Qualifying Tournament.

The Dominican head coach, of course, is John Calipari.

"Charlie was not in good form when we saw him," Calipari said to Deportes en la Z, after Villanueva had a private workout for the team in New York. "He was overweight, and unfortunately, we could not slow down the entire team and it was a decision taken collectively."

Just got off a conference call with George Blaney, who’ll be coaching UConn in its first three Big East games, including Wednesday’s opener at South Florida.

Blaney said the fact that he’s known about Jim Calhoun’s three-game suspension since last February doesn’t make things any easier this time around.

“I don’t think ‘easy’ is a good word,” he said. “You knew about it, the other ones kind of came more as a surprise or much quicker. We’re just trying to keep things going the way Coach would like them to go.”

Blaney said Calhoun attended UConn’s practice last night, told them what he wanted from them and watched the rest of the short practice. The Huskies had a long practice today and will have another tomorrow morning before departing for Tampa.

“You just try to maintain what we do, and what we do well,” Blaney said. “You try to really talk to the team about giving the kind of effort that he would demand of them. The more competitive we’ll be, the more successful we’ll be. It’s never easy to try to simulate what Jim would do. I don’t do some of things he does, he wouldn’t some of the things I do. We just try to keep it in line with what we do in practice.”

Blaney isn’t worried as much about the team’s first true road game as he is 7-6 South Florida.

“I think South Florida’s really good,”he said. “They have really excellent players, big big’s that can score inside and pop out outside and shoot the ball well. They have a number of good, swing-type athletes, and I think they’re vastly improved from last year.”

Indeed, Augustus Gilchrist has been somewhat of a UConn-killer over the years. The Bulls took UConn to overtime before losing last year in Hartford, beat the Huskies in Tampa the year before and were slain by a Craig Austrie last-second shot in Tampa in 2008.

Blaney expects to have Roscoe Smith playing some power forward to counter USF’s versatile big men, and stressed UConn needs a big effort from Alex Oriakhi on the boards and on defense.

He’s also happy to have a supporting staff of Kevin Ollie, Glen Miller and Ben Wood with him for the next three games.

“They really have been through this before, they know how to help, so I’ll rely on them a great deal,” Blaney said. “Their energy will help us a lot, too … Sometimes as a head coach you don’t see things, where when you’re watching as an assistant, you see the overall picture a little bit more.”