ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. — Make no mistake, Mark Schmidt would rather have been in his normal routine.

He’d have preferred to be out unturning stones in search of that next unheralded, yet high-impact, recruit. He’d have wanted to be in the Reilly Center, hosting prospective players and breaking down film in his office. He’d have given plenty to be with his guys in person over the would-be summer school sessions rather than in front of a webcam.

Schmidt, for all intents and purposes, is a high-major coach and a basketball lifer.

That’s where an intense passion lies, and that’s what he’s paid to do.

For all that he lost in the months during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, it isn’t lost on St. Bonaventure’s 14th-year coach what he gained.

“One (thing) is spend more time with my family; not going out on the road recruiting, not being able to get into the office,” Schmidt said on a recent episode of the Marching to Madness podcast, hosted by Ken Cross, before adding with a laugh, “My wife may say otherwise, but I thought that was a good thing.

“I have three sons … I was able to spend some time with them, play some more golf; I probably played more golf this offseason than I’ve played in a long, long time.”

Mostly, though, Schmidt was able to allow himself to sit back and learn.

IN NEARLY 20 years as a head coach, he’d become a creature of habit, becoming almost tunnel-visioned by the regimen that has led to Bona becoming a top-tier Atlantic 10 program over the last half-decade. By being made to be idle, he was given a chance to press pause and look around.

“Growing as a coach, (it’s) watching tape, watching your games, what we can do better … but it’s watching other things,” he noted. “Sometimes when you’re in this business, you can get stagnant and set in your ways, and I think it was a time where you could really look at what other people were doing, listen to clinics.

“You don’t have all the answers; the more you can learn, the better coach you become. Just looking at how other guys get into things offensively, I think that’s been really good for me in these last five or six months.”

Schmidt and the Bonnies, though — understandably — want to be practicing again, to begin preparing in earnest for the season, one that might come in November, in January or not at all. Nearly a month since returning to campus and clearing coronavirus testing and essentially restarting from scratch, they’re getting closer to that point.

BONA, Schmidt said, isn’t exactly back to full speed.

It’s still progressing slowly, and safely, from a conditioning standpoint. It’s begun individual workouts, but (as of Tuesday) had yet to incorporate contact. On Wednesday, it was going to start playing 3-on-3 and 4-on-4 for the first time since reconvening.

But the sights and sounds emanating from both within the RC and out suggest that basketball has returned, at least in some capacity; that, beyond the need to wear masks and scrub down dumbbells after each rotation within the makeshift weight room in the parking lot, it’s business as usual for the Bonnies.

The players, based on pictures put out by the program’s social media team, look as though they’re getting closer to where they want to be physically. After months without it, they once again have unlimited access to a ball and basket.

“So I think we’ve done a good job (since coming back), the players have done a good job, now we’re going to take that next step,” Schmidt said, “and hopefully in that next step, we can continue to keep them safe.”

The question is, as the uncertainty in sports, particularly at the collegiate level, continues to rage on, what, exactly is the next step?

While attempting to maintain a sense of normalcy, Bona is operating under the assumption that its season-opener is going to take place in early November against, say, Patriot League foe Colgate. But it knows that what it’s planning for today may not be plausible tomorrow.

“The question I have is, when’s the season going to start,” Schmidt offered. “You don’t want to wear out your guys. If you look at it, you think the season’s going to start in November, so practice starts early October, so you’re building up for that.

“But what happens if (the season) starts in January? What do you do with conditioning and stuff, because you don’t want to wear your guys out too soon. So that’s a concern that I have.”

IN HIS 13-minute segment with Cross, Schmidt touched on a handful of players — what they’ve brought to the program and where they need to improve — individually (more on that in Saturday’s column). “When you have your point guard and your big guy that can get along,” he said, citing the pre-Bona friendship between Kyle Lofton and Osun Osunniyi, “that goes a long way.”

He also hit on where the Bonnies, as a team, need to improve the most. For him, that’s guarding the 3-point line.

A year ago, Bona finished a respectable eighth in the A-10 in 3-point field goal percentage defense (.329), but surrendered a whopping 256 treys (8.3 per game), the most in the league, and 12 more than the next closest team.

“We’ve got to do a better job of eliminating 3-pointers,” he maintained. “Teams made (9.2 in league play) against us last year; we’ve gotta get that number down. Our transition defense has to get better, but I thought our on-ball defense wasn’t great and guys were able to get into the paint.

“We’ve got to do a better job of keeping the ball in front of us, we’ve got to do a better job of not allowing direct drives. And ‘Shoon helps our defense being a rim protector, but (it’s) us collapsing, them kicking it out and shooting rhythm 3s. We can get better in all areas, but that’s the one glaring weakness we had last year.”

(J.P. Butler, Bradford Publishing Company group sports editor, can be reached at jbutler@oleantimesherald.com)