Syracuse, N.Y. – Syracuse basketball coaches started planning a summer trip last year. They looked at their roster, anticipated what it might look like a year later, figured it would be filled with young, impressionable players and decided the Summer of 2019 would be laced with foreign intrigue.

“You go when you have freshmen,” said SU coach Jim Boeheim, whose team last played internationally in 2013. “These five freshmen all could play.”

The Syracuse freshmen – Quincy Guerrier, Joe Girard, John Bol Ajak, Jesse Edwards and Brycen Goodine – will be joined by sophomores Buddy Boeheim, Jalen Carey and Robert Braswell. Of those young guys, only Boeheim has played significant college basketball minutes. Howard Washington missed the entire year after surviving a stroke last fall. Bourama Sidibe still felt lingering effects of surgery to repair knee tendinitis.

Elijah Hughes and Marek Dolezaj each have ample experience, but the Orange this season will retool a lineup that lost starters Tyus Battle, Frank Howard, Oshae Brissett and Paschal Chukwu.

They will travel, as a team, to Italy from Aug. 10 to Aug. 20 to play four games against Italian national teams. And while those games could be revelatory, the entirety of the late summer for Syracuse will be particularly useful.

The NCAA allows four hours of instruction per week while players attend summer school. For Syracuse, which has elected to go on a foreign trip, it allows 10 full practices before the Orange departs for its international destination. Jim Boeheim said he will likely spread those practices between July and August. Every scholarship player except Marek Dolezaj is currently on campus attending summer school.

“All this stuff is going to help you,” Boeheim said. “Ten full days of practice. Then you get to play in games, which will be decent competition. Everybody will play. All 12 guys will play in all four games.”

Boeheim said practices will be dedicated as much to offense as defense and will not primarily focus on teaching new players the nuances of the 2-3 zone.

Coaches, he said, installed a new play last week so players could work on it when they scrimmage. The team plays pick-up games a few times a week. Coaches can watch those games if they count them toward the NCAA’s mandated four hours of instruction. Boeheim said he and his staff watch a bit of scrimmaging, but mostly focus on individual workouts.

The team, he said, will play some man-to-man on its foreign trip. Because his teams never practice it during the regular season, he said, he would never switch to a man defense during a game that matters.

“You can’t try a man-to-man,” he said, “if you don’t practice it. I’d never switch to man-to-man unless we were able to play good man-to-man. Ever.”

But he will try it in summer circumstances, when the room is ripe for experimentation and the consequences are negligible. Every team, he said, is different. Every year, he said, the man-to-man possibility exists.

“I would never gamble in a game during the regular season, but if you gamble over there and it doesn’t work, it’s not going to be a problem,” he said. “Until I see them I don’t know that there’s not some possibility that we won’t play some man-to-man. So we’ll see how this team is and then after we get through practices in the fall, we’ll decide if we play it in some situations.”

SU last year occasionally used a 2-2-1 zone press to offer an alternative defensive look, but because coaches weren’t impressed by how it worked, another press will be installed this summer.

That’s the beauty of the Italy trip. Lineups can be manipulated to achieve different results. Plays can be attempted. Without the pressure of wins and losses, anything is possible.

“You play everybody and you get to look at everybody,” Boeheim said. “You wouldn’t experiment like that in the regular season. So that’s what’s good about these trips. And the freshmen get out there and play games. That’s good, too.”

On the new 3-point line: College basketball players will now be attempting to make 3-point shots from the international distance of 22 feet, 1¾ inches (from 20 feet, 9 inches). Boeheim said the greater distance will not impact the way his zone will defend the shot, or the way it attempts to cover the interior.

“We’ve always stretched there. There’s nothing new,” he said. “Just forget the line’s there. We play where the shooters are. We’re out there. We play outside the line now because that’s where some of these guys shoot. There will be a slight change. Some guys might not be able to shoot that a little further back. That would actually help us. But it won’t change the way we play one bit. We will still extend out to the shooters. That doesn’t change at all.”