It’s been an up-and-down season for Arizona Wildcats senior forward Jamelle Horne. Like that’s a big surprise. His whole career has been that way. But after his 16-point, 12-rebound effort against Stanford, coach Sean Miller was pretty pleased with his one senior.

“We need Jamelle to play well,’’ Miller as he prepares for Arizona State on Saturday (12:30 p.m. in McKale Center).

“We need everybody to play well. It’s no fun to watch one or two guys be in the tank. Jamelle’s performance should give him confidence. It gave me confidence because he did a lot more than make some shots.’’

It’s not clear if Horne will be back in the starting lineup, replacing Jesse Perry, but once again Horne said he’s plenty comfortable coming off the bench.

Miller said it doesn’t much matter; he just wants both those guys to play well at the power forward spot — something that hasn’t happened in the same game very often this season.

This is strange

Arizona recruit Josiah Turner was all but out at Sacramento High earlier this week. He’s now reportedly back. In a 24-hour period he was in and out and on and off the basketball team.

Well, now he’s back.

It’s not clear when he’ll return to the team after missing the last game last week. Coach Derek Swafford said there has to be consequences for Turner’s actions, and one would be to possibly sit out for an undisclosed period of time.

“Josiah’s still here and we’d like to have him back on the team,” Swafford told the Sacramento Bee. “Josiah wants to be here. Our team just wants to play. We are willing to work with him, but there are always consequences for actions, and that’s got to be clear.”

Life in transition has been the Turner way apparently. According to the Bee, Turner played his freshman season at Cordova before transferring to Sac High as a sophomore. He transferred for eight days to Sheldon in the fall of 2009 before returning to Sac High for his junior year.

Arizona’s Miller declined to comment on Turner’s situation but said it’ll work itself out.

Pastner struggling

To say it’s not a surprise that former Arizona coach Josh Pastner is struggling at Memphis would be an understatement. I – and many who probably wouldn’t admit it publicly – would think that too.

Pastner, one of the all-time best guys, is young and considered a nice guy in many circles. He has some talent at Memphis, but the team is young and inexperienced.

When he garnered the top recruiting class last year people said he was going to be just fine with the Tigers. The one thing people didn’t talk about: now he’ll have to coach them. Let’s face it. Josh is young and may be too nice.

It’s not a surprise he’s already had to suspend two players this year. No question his players are testing him. As a result the team is struggling –- forget the talent. On Wednesday, Memphis lost to Southern Methodist on the road as it blew a 14-point lead.

“Pathetic,” said Memphis guard Will Barton in the Memphis Commercial Appeal. “I’m not going to say a loss is bigger than another loss. Any loss hurts, but I’m down. I don’t know what to think about this team or anything else. I’m lost. This is the dumbest thing I ever saw in my life.

“To fix it, people have just gotta really look in the mirror — coaches, players, managers — because this just ain’t working right now. If we want to do some good things, we’ve gotta change some stuff because this is terrible, man.”

In a Commercial Appeal poll (with just 78 voters in) the leading thought was that the team’s struggles were due to the lack of coaching experience. Here’s to Pastner -– good luck. Who said it was going to be easy?

Judkins update

Remember former UA player Garland Judkins, the player who was suspended off and on throughout Russ Pennell’s year as coach two years ago?

Well, he’s at Texas A&M Corpus Christi, a team that is 5-11 overall. Judkins, a 6-foot-4 guard, is averaging 4.7 points and 1.3 rebounds a game. He started the season averaging close to 20 minutes a game, but has played 88 minutes in the last five games.

In a story in a Corpus Christi newspaper three weeks ago, Judkins said he was suspended under Pennell because he was late to classes and missed team meetings. At the time, Arizona officials said it was “failing to meet team obligations.’’

“It was just being immature,” Judkins told the paper. “It was the coaches saying we need to sit you down so you understand this is a business and figure out where you need to go in life.

“There are no hard feelings. There was no one incident where I did something wrong. I was just a young kid, first time away from home. Great lesson.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 13th, 2011 at 10:07 pm and is filed under Sports. Tags for this post: Garland Judkins, Jamelle Horne, Jose Pastner, Josiah Turner. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.