As a team, we know that we've got to come out and be on top of everything from start to finish. If we're going to get anywhere down the road, in the playoffs, we need to refocus really quick and get ready for Central Friday night. |
At that point it's anybody's game. |
Bill and Jay, they're our bread and butter as far as rebounding goes. |
Bill played one of the best games he's played all season. He's one of the leaders on the floor and he's one that when we talk at halftime, he really takes it to heart and he takes things as a challenge. |
Every team that we play is putting their best defender on Chris and they're trying to shut him down. But we've got a lot of guys out there we feel can score. We're also working really hard to get Chris open. I thought he played a pretty heads up game. |
From the first quarter, right on through the fourth, I feel our kids played a good game. It's always our hope that everyone will get involved and it was great to see Kyle Morrow come in and play well. I'm hopeful that Kyle can continue to come in and contribute. |
Hamilton, all his points were on free throws or second chance shots. His 12 points was the difference in the game. |
He's an all-around player. The nice thing about him is he can shoot the ball and shoot it with a good deal of accuracy. He makes his free throws too. He's just now starting to get an idea of what he can do when he really works at it. |
His leadership was definitely there. He did such a good job as a leader on the floor. Even when he wasn't in the game he was a leader on the floor and that was a really important part of our success for the year was having him accept that role. There were times when he took the team on his shoulders and carried them through - showed them the way, which is big. It shows a lot of heart, a lot of leadership and a lot of ability. |
I can't say enough about how hard they played in that second half. If we could have done any of that in the first half, I think we could have turned the game around. In the second half there were so many places we could have turned it around, too. I can't say enough about the effort that the kids put out. It was amazing, it really was. |
I make substitutions based on who can hit a free throw. Keith Cochran is our most accurate free throw shooter. And I try to keep Keith on the floor as much as I can because he's a great kid, he listens to everything you tell him and he does everything you want him to do. We need to have people going to the line who can hit free throws. We focus on free throws every day in practice. |
I thought another young man who had one of the better games he's played all season was Spencer. He got some huge rebounds. It was nice to look down there and see this guy way up in the air grabbing the ball and it was Spencer. And then offensively, he was attacking. |
I thought we played better each time we played. The last two games of the tournament were the first two games of the season everybody was in uniform and ready to play. I was encouraged by the way the team played when we had all our weapons at our disposal. |
I was pleased with the way our kids kept playing defense. I'm proud of the way our kids played all four quarters. |
It was a really good game and Taft has a good team. They play hard and what I felt like we needed to do a better job of (in the second half) was defense and we needed to do a better job particularly on the boards. Playing better defensively was what we talked about at halftime. And I thought we did. Our offense starts on defense. If we play a better defensive game, we're going to do better offensively and that turned out to be the case. |