Kansas State Head Coach Quotes
Feb 21, 2006 | General
On the difference in each half...
“I think we competed this game extremely well and made it a basketball game and just dealt with the personality that it took on early in the half. I felt great about the way our team fought back in the first half. You go in at halftime and you’ve evened the basketball game and competed your possessions really well and I felt that way in the second half as well. I think the difference for us in the second half was we did not finish shots. That was just a big factor. I thought our execution was still intense and we were committed. We did not throw the ball away, but we did not finish plays. We just couldn’t get the shots to go down that were going down in the first half. We were 34 percent from the floor in the second half. As you compare individual numbers for players from the first and second half, that was the difference. Even with that, you are in the ballgame with 3:30 left in the basketball game, and that is when they began to pull away. That is when I think those missed shots and their ability to step up and get to the foul line was pretty significant.”
On their defensive plan...
“We just wanted to vary our looks defensively, particularly in the post. We wanted to use a lot of people and give them different looks and spread the floor a little bit. I thought our players did a nice job of that all around. Courtney (
On playing a top-10 team...
“I was really proud of our basketball team. None of us are happy that we did not win the game. We had Claire (Coggins) coming back from illness. We had (Kimberly) Dietz playing with the flu for minutes out there. Tonight we demonstrated that we can be a very good basketball team possession by possession competing with a top-10 team in the country. The game was about even with 3 minutes left and we had fought hard. We played far from perfect, but so did they. I credit our team with that. I feel like we are getting better, and that was the challenge coming into this basketball game. We knew the magnitude of the opponent, and our players stepped up and really asserted that we are going to be a team to reckon with down the stretch here in the Big 12. We are going to line up and compete with Baylor, and go to
