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UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN BASKETBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

December 7, 2015

Bobbie Kelsey

Madison, Wisconsin

COACH KELSEY: We finished up a long five-day road stance here came out pretty okay. We dropped Marquette last night. Very disappointed in that game, but a lot of travel, a lot of tight games, and some we pulled out and some we were right there and couldn't quite pull it out. But it will be nice to be back in the Kohl Center. But we have a tough opponent in Florida. They're very aggressive, quick, and we're going to do certain things to slow them down and to keep them from getting some of the things they want that make them really good. So we're going to work on that in the next two days.

Q. When you go to practice this week, what is your focus and bouncing off of yesterday, how do you go about fixing what you saw?
COACH KELSEY: We just have to make sure that the kids know it's not what we're running. It's our effort to run it correctly. We gave up 50. They got 50 rebounds yesterday. 23 of those were O-boards. But three people had 17 of them. So you can't continue to give the same individual O-board after O-board after O-board, and our recognition of that was not very good. And that's a part of effort.

O-board, you have to take a shot to get an offensive rebound, so if they miss it, you've done a pretty decent job on defense, but you have to finish the play. And the play being finished it boxing out. Other people are going to watch the tape and tell their kids, hit the boards, because they don't box out. So we have to fix that immediately and then execute our offense a little bit better.

But we were getting our shots. We got bunnies right underneath the basket. You have to finish. So it's not one thing. You know, you've got to correct a couple of different things if you want to give yourself a chance to win the game.

Q. You had a little lineup change a few games ago. Is that something you'll rethink?
COACH KELSEY: Yeah, we'll definitely rethink because we have to get a better start to the game. Obviously this game we did not start off very well. We played even the rest of the quarters if not ahead. But if you dig yourself a 13-point hole, for no other reason than not boxing out, which the first, I guess, five 0-boards in the first three minutes of the game, that's not a good sign to say, hey, we're ready to play and we know what we need to do.

Q. When you mentioned earlier it's about effort, I would imagine that's got to grind your gears a little bit when you're not seeing the effort that you want. How do you handle that? Are the Bobby Knight days of get on the line and run them to death over? What do you do in 2015?
COACH KELSEY: It's hard. That's a great question because you don't want to grind them down to a fine powder, as they say, because we don't have a lot of bodies, so we can't do that necessarily. So we have to appeal to their performance base, understanding of what it takes to win. It's going to improve your performance if you do X, Y and Z, and not really tearing them down because, again, we can show them the tape. And you do some of that. You don't not do it.

But there is a fine line between doing too much of that and trying to motivate them and inspire them to make the corrections that you want to see. That's the hard job we have as coaches. Because we're critiquing ourselves, what can we do different? What information can we give them? Is it too much? Is it not enough?

In the game, you're going to have some changes. If a shooter is in the pick-and-roll, well, you can't guard the same way as a non-shooter in the pick-and-roll. So you have to be able to adjust to these things on the fly. When you've got one error because there is a different person in the pick-and-roll situation or with the basketball, then you have to look at that and say, hey, are we teaching them right? Are we confusing them?

But some of that, players have to take responsibility as well. Ask questions. Know what you're doing, remind yourself. I don't know how everybody works. I learned a different way. I may learn by watching it one time. I've got it. We have kids like that. Some, we can watch it, and go over it, and they've still got to study it.

It's just like anything else with life. If you study, anybody can learn if you study. But some people can look at it once and they've got it. Other people have to study all day long. They can still get it, but it's just a different method of learning. So we have to make sure everybody understands you have to know how you learn. If you're not getting it by not asking enough questions or coming up and watching tape or walking through it, getting the paper diagrams, everybody is different in that way.

So they have to really help us help them. If you don't know it, you've got to come up and tell us. Because if you nod your head yes, that's telling me you know it. Then you get out there and do it wrong, and that's not a good indication of knowledge of what we're doing.

Q. There was a time where coaches did that, does that work?
COACH KELSEY: Not so much. Kids nowadays, and I guess every generation has said the next one is soft, I don't know. Our grandparents and great grandparents probably think we're soft. I'm sure they do, because they had to do things that, hey, you just have to get it. 14, you were grown way back in the day. 14-year-olds now, they're still like little kids.

So times have changed. But you can't do it so much fear based. I don't think that works anymore with these particular kids, because they're allowed to ask a lot of questions. Their opinions are asked a whole bunch. Adults are kind of getting their input on a lot of things that I didn't have input on when I was a kid. If adults were talking, you were over here. You weren't in that conversation. So it's just different.

But I think you still can use some of that to get their attention. Some of it is sitting them down, changing that lineup, not letting people get comfortable. I hope that's not the case, but, again, motivation, you can do it a lot of different ways.

But that's our job as coaches to try to figure that out without losing them. You can't lose them. You've got to keep playing these games. They're going to be tough for us because we're not going to blow people out by 20 and 30 points. That's not how we're built. But we've shown ourselves. We can win a tight game. That Delaware game is tight. We drew up a play, never had run it before, and Cayla went and scored it. We had the same opportunity in the San Diego State game, but we didn't execute it quite as well as we wanted to. So the long answer is you can't use so much of that, but you still have to use some of it.

Q. What type of challenges does Florida present?
COACH KELSEY: Florida is aggressive, they're athletic, they're quick, they know how to score. They have a lot of people. They play ten people over 14 minutes a game. So they're shuffling them in and out. But if we do what we're supposed to do the way we're supposed to do it, we'll give ourselves a chance, just like they're doing the same thing on their side. If you've got to do certain things against us to keep us from scoring.

But it's disappointing from yesterday because we just didn't box out the way we should have. Because if you give people second and third point chances, they have 31 second-chance points, you're not going to beat anybody doing that.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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