Our kids never wavered. We kept saying to stay positive, that there was 40 minutes in the game and you can't give up. |
Our objective was to create as much havoc as we could defensively and to keep at least one guy (Lee) in who could score. |
Our philosophy was if we could get a group of young players, we could teach them how to win. I think program building at our level is difficult. We knew there would be difficult times ahead. |
That 11 points is a joke. That's no indication of how tough the game was. |
That shot just epitomized where we were. I don't think we doubted ourselves. They were stunned because they really believed they could get this done. |
That's real life. To see in the people's eyes what they went through... We get hung up on basketball sometimes, we forget there's a real world out there. |
That's the kind of guy Paul is. He's just a salt?of?the?earth type person. |
The mood is a little different (Sunday) - you go from the top of the world to the bottom of the trash barrel. The turnovers were pretty much the game. |
The style we play is the style we believe we can be competitive with. At our level, if you can get some good athletes that can play hard and you can keep the intensity level up, then we think we can be competitive against bigger schools. |
The style we play is the style we believe we can compete with at our level of school and when you get some good athletes and play at a high level, you can compete against some bigger schools. We have good athletes and good basketball players. It's a good mixture and blend. Clifton Lee is one of those guys who's just a good basketball player. |
There's no greater example of team before individual than what they've done. When you depend on two guys to get points, you're vulnerable to get upset by a lower-level team that is hitting you from five different ways. That's difficult to prepare for, because you don't know where we're going to hit you from ... in reverse, we know exactly where their points are coming from and we can focus on slowing them down. |
There's nothing you can do. We gave them several opportunities. They just did a phenomenal job. We didn't do the little things, but fortunately we locked up and defended. We had some guys step up and meet the challenge. |
These young men bought into what we wanted to do four years ago. Only in America do you have the opportunity to take a group of young men that will believe in what you are trying to do. |
These young men bought into what we were trying to do. |
They have long, strong players that do a good job running that defense. I believe that, if you play a different style of game in a tournament, it's very effective, because preparation time is so short between games. |