Last week there was a great deal of excitement surrounding Tyus Battle’s announcement that he’d return to Syracuse for his junior campaign, instantaneously vaulting the Orange into many a preseason top-25 rankings (if it weren’t there already).

As it turns out, former Syracuse Orange guard turned assistant coach Allen Griffin found out about Tyus Battle’s decision around the same time as the rest of us.

The Syracuse bigs coach hopped on Orange Nation on Friday with Steve Infanti and Seth Goldberg and detailed a little nugget that disclosed he didn’t have any prior knowledge whether Tyus would come back to Syracuse or head off to chase the NBA.

“I know me, I was playing softball and when it first broke I was like ‘holy cow,’ you know, my umpire was like ‘hey you should be a happy guy,’ and I was like ‘why should I be happy I’m about to strike out in slow pitch softball?’ and he was like ‘no, they just announced that Tyus is coming back,’” Griffin said on air.

Ha! Brilliant.

That’s a nice anecdote in there. Sometimes we forget that the members inside of the team aren’t always the first to know, but more importantly we learned that Griff plays softball in his spare time.

The audio file of the interview is linked again here. Hats off to Seth for grabbing that one and to Griff for sharing that story.