Before a basketball game, Oklahoma guard Je'lon Hornbeak receives encouraging messages from his lifetime coach.

“Only you can hold you back,” she tells him.

Oklahoma's Je'lon Hornbeak (5) goes between Ohio's Ivo Baltic (23) and Reggie Keely (30) during an NCAA college basketball game between the University of Oklahoma (OU) and Ohio at the Lloyd Noble Center in Norman, Saturday, Dec. 29, 2012. Oklahoma won 74-63. Photo by Bryan Terry, The Oklahoman

“Be a leader, not a follower,” she reminds him.

Sheila Hornbeak has been telling her son these messages since he was a young boy.

For a summer in between Je'lon's freshman and sophomore year in high school, Sheila was able to stand in the team huddle and share them face-to-face. She was, after all, an assistant coach on his AAU squad. Now, with Je'lon at Oklahoma, she calls her son and reminds him before each start.

Those messages and her time spent as a coach has helped the bond between Sheila and Je'lon grow into a mature mother-son relationship, but the summer they were on the same team that bond was stretched.

“There was a lot of tension,” Sheila said. “I knew what he could do, but he wasn't showing it.”

Sheila tried to explain to Je'lon that even though she last played basketball in high school, she still understood the game and understood what he needed to do to improve. Je'lon thought she knew nothing.

He rolls his eyes still sometimes when that summer gets brought up.

“Man,” Je'lon said. “That was a rough summer.”

His mom told him what he did wrong and tried to help him get better while trying to embarrass him as little as possible.

“I always understood him,” Sheila said. “He had to understand me. ... But I used to be the hated one.”

 HOUSTON - For the third time this season, University of Houston forward Danuel House was honored as the Conference USA

Freshman of the Week on Monday.

The Hightower High product was the team's leading scorer in losses at C-USA rivals East Carolina and against UCF. House averaged 18.5 points and 4.5 assists per game to lead the Cougars in both categories.

He scored a team-high 22 points at East Carolina for his fifth 20-point game of the season and followed that with a 15-point, 11-rebound performance against UCF on Saturday inside Hofheinz Pavilion for the first double-double of his young career.

Making his sixth consecutive start, House flirted with a triple-double against the Knights, dishing out a career-high six assists while playing all but four minutes in the game.

He picked up the weekly accolade for the third time this season. House earned his first weekly award on Dec. 10 after scoring 22 points with six rebounds in a 79-57 win against Louisiana-Lafayette on Dec. 15. He followed that on Dec. 31 after scoring 22 points with seven rebounds in a home win against Prairie View A&M.

House tied with Tulsa's James Woodard for the most Freshman weekly awards in 2012-13.

Tulane's Josh Davis was honored as the C-USA Player of the Week.

 Even though the Longhorns are going to have a small recruiting class this year, you knew it wouldn't be long until they started to add a couple of commitments. After shifting their focus from combo guards to point guards, Texas put the full-court press on underrated point guard Isaiah Taylor of The Village (Houston). Texas wasted no time by getting the 2013 prospect on campus for its game against North Carolina, and the approach quickly paid off.