Alarm clocks, zones and Twitter ...

College basketball is back -- at last.

N.C. State, North Carolina, Wake Forest and Duke have hit the practice court, met with the fans and talked to the media. Here are a few dribbles from last week.

N.C. State is trying to get better, earlier.

Coach Sidney Lowe has moved daily practice from about 3:30 p.m. to 7 a.m. Yawn.

"I just thought about some things -- changing up and trying to take advantage of the time," he said. "It's hard, it's a difficult schedule for these guys when you're talking about the academic piece, as well as athletics. Getting up, going to class. Going to practice around 3:30. Study hall 7 to 9 ... and some of them probably don't go to sleep until 11 -- some of them, 12 or 1 o' clock. That's a long day.

"And then we're asking them to practice after they've been going all day in class. So we'll try something different, see if this will give them more energy, more free time to study, and also they're fresh for practice."

So far, Lowe said, no one has complained to him.

"Yet," he added, laughing.

Duke playing zone? With a forward-driven team, it's apparently going to happen.

"Length [size] is really good, but you've got to be careful that you don't spread length out too much to where you lose the advantage of having length," coach Mike Krzyzewski said. "So we've just got to come up with a few ways of dictating tempo when it's needed with the people that we have, and it will be different than how we've dictated tempo in the past on defense."

That probably means the Z-word.

"I wouldn't put anything past [us]," point guard Jon Scheyer said.

"More than anything, our length is really good. So however we can use that to the best of our ability, I think we'll do. We've looked at zone in the past, but this year, because we are a bigger team, I know we definitely won't press as much and extend ourselves as we have.

"But zone is definitely a possibility."

UNC forward Ed Davis lost a good-natured bet with teammate Marcus Ginyard last month to see which player could attract more followers on Twitter, so the sophomore forward will have to wear Ginyard's No. 1 jersey for the rest of the Tar Heels' home football games.

"Hopefully it gets cold so I can put a jacket on," Davis quipped.

Losing the bet hasn't dulled his love for the social networking site, which asks people to answer "What are you doing?" in 140 characters or less.

"It's just a fun thing to do; we're trying to get everyone on the team on it," he said. "We just got Larry [Drew II] on it earlier this week, we're trying to get Deon [Thompson] on it, the Wear twins, Dexter [Strickland]. It's just a fun thing to do, to get on there and see what celebrities do, and other people across the country."

Several players on the team have accounts, although Thompson, who prefers Facebook, doesn't plan to join the tweeting craze any time soon.

"I'm not going in," Thompson insisted. "I just don't want to be 'followed' like that. I'm not giving in."

Receiving a two-year contract extension must have been a relief for Wake Forest coach Dino Gaudio. Not because it really adds that much job security, but because it helps in recruiting.

Having a deal through 2013-14, rather than 2011-12, means he can tell potential prospects that he expects to be in Winston-Salem for their entire careers.

However, the extension doesn't mean he's not under the gun with Deacs fans after last season's fade, but it does give him more ammunition to keep luring potential stars.

N.C. State point guard Javi Gonzalez's mother, who lives in Puerto Rico, has never seen her son play a home game in Raleigh.

But that's going to change this season.

"I'm planning to get her up here for either the Carolina or Duke game; I'm going to pay her ticket to come up here once the ACC season starts," the junior said.

His mother, Ivette Lopez, can watch games when they're televised, and when he went home over the season, Gonzalez took her a stack of DVDs from all of his outings last season. When she can't watch a game, it usually means a long phone call.

"Sometimes we lose, and I'm not really in the mood to tell her what happened, but I end up telling her anyway," he said.

Gonzalez paid his mom's way to watch the Wolfpack's road game at Miami last season, "but I'm looking forward to getting her up here to Raleigh, so she can see where I am and see how different it is from Puerto Rico."

Former UNC coach Dean Smith apparently had an influence on Jerry Colangelo's decision to hire Krzyzewski as the 2008 men's basketball Olympic head coach (he'll coach in the next Olympics, as well).

In an interview that will air this week on The $ports Take with Sports Professor Rick Horrow on the Versus channel, Colangelo, the national director of USA Basketball, recalls that in 2005 Krzyzewski was his favorite candidate. Then he called a meeting of more than 30 former Olympic players and coaches, including Jerry West, Michael Jordan, Chuck Daly and Smith.

"When we started talking about the college coaches and all the best names in college basketball, Dean Smith said, 'The only college guy up there who could really get the job done is Coach K,' " Colangelo told Versus.

"That was one of his biggest rivals, [so it left] a big impression. ... I had to think about who I would be most comfortable with for the next three to four years in that foxhole, and I felt very comfortable with Coach K."

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