For the first preseason in a long time, the national spotlight is shining brightly on Georgetown.

It could be the No. 8 national ranking in both major national polls – Associated Press and USA Today/ESPN Coaches’ Poll – or the No. 2 spot in the Big East’s coaches’ poll. You can look at the fact that two Hoyas – juniors Jeff Green and Roy Hibbert – are on the preseason Wooden Award watch list, or you could look to the preseason all-Big East team, which features the same two Georgetown big men.

There’s also Andy Katz and Jay Bilas, ESPN college hoops experts who chose to make Georgetown one of the few stops on their preseason tours of college campuses, and Dick Vitale who also ranks the Hoyas eighth.

The Washington Post has been covering the Hoyas from the beginning, as has the Washington Times, but the print media exposure this year has not been limited to local papers. The Boston Globe ranked Georgetown 10th in its season preview, while the New York Daily News wrote an entire feature on Head Coach John Thompson III. In a poll conducted by the Syracuse Post Standard, 16 writers who routinely cover the Big East picked the Hoyas to win the league.

According to the Georgetown Sports Information office, the media frenzy is just heating up. Mex Carey, Georgetown’s Sports Information director, said that since he joined the athletic department a little over a year ago, the amount of attention that the Hoyas have received has grown daily.

Bill Shapland (CAS ’77), the senior sports communications director who has been working in McDonough since the 1984-85 season, says that the preseason attention easily surpasses Thompson III’s first season.

“Remember, though, you’re asking someone whose job it is to fuel that fervor,” Shapland added.

Shapland, the man who Thompson calls a “bodyguard,” recalls the excitement that surrounded the team in the mid 1980s, saying that with the smaller Big East, daily newspaper from other league locales, such as Connecticut, would be calling every day and that both Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News were frequently on the other end of the sometimes never-ending phone calls.

“This year,” Shapland said, “we’ve gotten a lot [of media requests] and, in some ways, more [than in the past]. The growth of the Internet has caused more and more people to become involved.”

For Thompson and his players, however, the extra attention means very little.

When asked if the hype has made this preseason different than the last two, team captain Tyler Crawford, a junior guard forward, flatly said, “No, I think for the most part we all understand that we need to work hard. I mean that’s always been part of our preseason regimen, so it’s no different than any other one.”

Junior guard Jon Wallace, one of three returning starters, has noticed that the national spotlight has cast a powerful beam on the Hilltop, but doesn’t seem to be fazed. “Of course the attention is a little bit different, but with this team, this year we have stayed focus on what we need to do as a team,” he said. “The preseason hype is all well and good, but at the same time we are aware of what we have to do to be successful.”

For Thompson, his third season has just been business as usual. “Has it been different?” he asked. “Probably, because at this time last year it was just these two [writers from the Washington Post and Times] here, and now . people are upset that they couldn’t be here.

“So to that end, is it different? Yes. But in the big picture, and how we have gone about and will go about things, it’s still the same as the first day two years ago. It’s about us. It’s about how we go about our business.”

Not quite everything that has been written about Georgetown this fall has been positive. “It’s surprising how many people are jacked up about Georgetown,” Kevin McNamara of the Providence Journal told the Syracuse Post-Standard. “The Hoyas have the best 1-2 post pair in the country in Hibbert and Green, but do Jonathan Wallace and Jessie Sapp at guard make your heart skip a beat? Not me.”

McNamara’s comments haven’t exactly made the hearts of Wallace or Sapp skip a beat, either.

“I’ve heard a lot of comments like that going around in the preseason,” Wallace said. “To a degree, it drives you a little more . But we’re a confident group of guys in the backcourt who know what our capabilities are and what we’re capable of doing and stuff like that doesn’t really faze us much.”

Sapp hasn’t lost any sleep over it either. “We don’t really pay attention to that,” he said. “We just work hard everyday just to get better. It’s a little bit of inspiration, it makes us work harder than we’ve been working.”

As for Thompson, he doesn’t pay much attention to anything written about his team, good or bad: “What people write is irrelevant.”

For the first preseason in a long time, the national spotlight is shining brightly on Georgetown.

It could be the No. 8 national ranking in both major national polls – Associated Press and USA Today/ESPN Coaches’ Poll – or the No. 2 spot in the Big East’s coaches’ poll. You can look at the fact that two Hoyas – juniors Jeff Green and Roy Hibbert – are on the preseason Wooden Award watch list, or you could look to the preseason all-Big East team, which features the same two Georgetown big men.

There’s also Andy Katz and Jay Bilas, ESPN college hoops experts who chose to make Georgetown one of the few stops on their preseason tours of college campuses, and Dick Vitale who also ranks the Hoyas eighth.

The Washington Post has been covering the Hoyas from the beginning, as has the Washington Times, but the print media exposure this year has not been limited to local papers. The Boston Globe ranked Georgetown 10th in its season preview, while the New York Daily News wrote an entire feature on Head Coach John Thompson III. In a poll conducted by the Syracuse Post Standard, 16 writers who routinely cover the Big East picked the Hoyas to win the league.

According to the Georgetown Sports Information office, the media frenzy is just heating up. Mex Carey, Georgetown’s Sports Information director, said that since he joined the athletic department a little over a year ago, the amount of attention that the Hoyas have received has grown daily.

Bill Shapland (CAS ’77), the senior sports communications director who has been working in McDonough since the 1984-85 season, says that the preseason attention easily surpasses Thompson III’s first season.

“Remember, though, you’re asking someone whose job it is to fuel that fervor,” Shapland added.

Shapland, the man who Thompson calls a “bodyguard,” recalls the excitement that surrounded the team in the mid 1980s, saying that with the smaller Big East, daily newspaper from other league locales, such as Connecticut, would be calling every day and that both Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News were frequently on the other end of the sometimes never-ending phone calls.

“This year,” Shapland said, “we’ve gotten a lot [of media requests] and, in some ways, more [than in the past]. The growth of the Internet has caused more and more people to become involved.”

For Thompson and his players, however, the extra attention means very little.

When asked if the hype has made this preseason different than the last two, team captain Tyler Crawford, a junior guard forward, flatly said, “No, I think for the most part we all understand that we need to work hard. I mean that’s always been part of our preseason regimen, so it’s no different than any other one.”

Junior guard Jon Wallace, one of three returning starters, has noticed that the national spotlight has cast a powerful beam on the Hilltop, but doesn’t seem to be fazed. “Of course the attention is a little bit different, but with this team, this year we have stayed focus on what we need to do as a team,” he said. “The preseason hype is all well and good, but at the same time we are aware of what we have to do to be successful.”

For Thompson, his third season has just been business as usual. “Has it been different?” he asked. “Probably, because at this time last year it was just these two [writers from the Washington Post and Times] here, and now . people are upset that they couldn’t be here.

“So to that end, is it different? Yes. But in the big picture, and how we have gone about and will go about things, it’s still the same as the first day two years ago. It’s about us. It’s about how we go about our business.”

Not quite everything that has been written about Georgetown this fall has been positive. “It’s surprising how many people are jacked up about Georgetown,” Kevin McNamara of the Providence Journal told the Syracuse Post-Standard. “The Hoyas have the best 1-2 post pair in the country in Hibbert and Green, but do Jonathan Wallace and Jessie Sapp at guard make your heart skip a beat? Not me.”

McNamara’s comments haven’t exactly made the hearts of Wallace or Sapp skip a beat, either.

“I’ve heard a lot of comments like that going around in the preseason,” Wallace said. “To a degree, it drives you a little more . But we’re a confident group of guys in the backcourt who know what our capabilities are and what we’re capable of doing and stuff like that doesn’t really faze us much.”

Sapp hasn’t lost any sleep over it either. “We don’t really pay attention to that,” he said. “We just work hard everyday just to get better. It’s a little bit of inspiration, it makes us work harder than we’ve been working.”

As for Thompson, he doesn’t pay much attention to anything written about his team, good or bad: “What people write is irrelevant.”