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NCAA MEN'S FIRST FOUR: DAYTON

March 14, 2017

Dayton, Ohio

Mount St. Mary's - 67, New Orleans - 66

THE MODERATOR: We're joined by Mount St. Mary's coach Jamion Christian and student-athletes Junior Robinson, Elijah Long and Miles Wilson.

COACH CHRISTIAN: What an amazing game. A lot of fun out there. Two teams that won their league, that won their league tournament, just love competing. When you get games like that in the month of March, it always has a great outcome.

We're really excited for that opportunity to start this month of March off, which is the best month in college basketball, and just thought it was a great performance by the University of New Orleans. Tremendous season and tremendous turnaround, play a really dominating style. Today we were able to find a way to be a little bit better in the month of March. That's all it matters.

THE MODERATOR: Questions for the student-athletes only.

Q. Elijah, Chris Wray is the team's defensive stopper. That last sequence seemed tailor-made for him, didn't it?
ELIJAH LONG: You've been following us the whole season, he makes plays offensively and defensively. I don't know what told me, but as soon as they threw it to his man I knew I had faith in him. And, Chris, he's clutch in close games.

Q. Junior Robinson, you played all 40 minutes. Seemed like you had as much energy at the end as you had at the start. What does it take to wear you out? You were doing just about everything tonight.
JUNIOR ROBINSON: I don't know, really, but I was just trying to be positive for our team and bring the energy I needed. Eli went down with two fouls and I made it any way I could.

Q. Junior, you had the ball and you were over there and Eli came up and wanted to take the lead there and you waived him off. What were your thoughts -- you went in, made that shot, took the lead?
JUNIOR ROBINSON: I didn't really wave him off. Coach told me to keep it. But either one of us can score at any time just like Miles can. We needed a bucket. Coach told me to keep it, and I went and got one.

Q. Junior, did you lose that ball on the way up or on the way through? And how did you get it back?
JUNIOR ROBINSON: When I crossed over it hit his foot. I looked down, it was still there. I grabbed it and shot it. So that's all we needed.

Q. Junior, I know a lot has been made about your height and throughout your career, and pardon the pun but how exciting is it for you to get a chance to measure up against Villanova? And I'm sure you've seen and watched them on TV throughout the last couple of years.
JUNIOR ROBINSON: Well, I mean, I feel like me and Eli are the best back court, so it's going to be a fun game.

Q. Miles, you seemed utterly unfazed out there. You're a freshman. Were you unfazed out there?
MILES WILSON: We've been working for this the whole season and the team believes in me. We just stayed together so I was just playing my game.

Q. Elijah, how confident are you guys and how confident are your teammates heading into the tournament building off a win like this?
ELIJAH LONG: That was a great team we played. Obviously they won the championship for their conference and they deserved to be here, and that gives us a lot of confidence in our non-conference schedule in the beginning, gave us a lot of confidence for our conference, and I think we have pieces and different assets to our game that we can feed off of. And it doesn't matter who is playing good or playing bad, people step up, people play their roles. So I think we're good with what we have, and we're very confident in not only ourselves but even the coaching staff.

Q. Did any of you watch Villanova last year win the national championship on TV? And at that moment would you have ever believed that one year later you'd be playing in the NCAA Tournament?
ELIJAH LONG: Yeah, I mean I know, I know a couple of players on that team so, yeah, I was definitely tuned in. That was a wild shot. No, I wouldn't have guessed once out of 100 times that we were going to play Villanova, but dreams come true and it is March Madness. So this is part of the madness. And we're looking forward to it.

JUNIOR ROBINSON: Yeah, like he said, that was a long shot, and we're living a dream right now. And in order to keep that dream going we've got to go out and compete against the best team that's overall No. 1.

MILES WILSON: Yeah, last year I watched that game. So we have a lot of respect. We go in there and play really hard.

Q. I'm assuming you guys believe that you will be the first 16 to beat a 1 in the history of the men's tournament, could you tell me why?
MILES WILSON: Records are meant to be broken. We're going to go and play really hard. Hopefully the ball bounces our way.

ELIJAH LONG: I mean, at the end of the day we all played basketball it's the same size ball, same size net. It's who wants it bad. And Villanova is a great team and one thing they bring to the table is their heart.

So we just gotta match that and I think we'll be in a good position to beat them or play good down to the wire and we'll see if we can break a bracket.

JUNIOR ROBINSON: It's hard going third. But I mean, like Miles said, records are meant to be broken. That's a team we're going to play. They play with a lot of heart, but we play with heart and passion. If the ball bounces our way, history will be broken.

THE MODERATOR: Questions for Coach Christian.

Q. Did you feel that last sequence was tailor-made for Chris Wray?
COACH CHRISTIAN: You know, we actually, Julian Boatner and Graham Bousley on our staff did an unbelievable job. We knew when the situation presented itself what they were going to do, and honestly we didn't defend it the way we talked about in the timeout.

But Chris Wray is a guy I talked about has competitive intelligence. It's as high as any player I've ever been around. He's the guy that in practice when you draw a play up, a special play, you've got to account for him because he's going to find a way to blow it up every single time.

So although we didn't defend that play the way we drew it up in the timeout, Chris Wray's ability to understand what he needed to do in the heat of the moment is so special he was able to make a great play on that basketball.

Q. Back on December 19th you guys were 1-11. Obviously played a tough schedule, but at that point did you think you'd be sitting here now having won an NCAA Tournament game? And also, what do you feel the turning point was in your season?
COACH CHRISTIAN: Absolutely I did. I believed in these guys from day one. We wouldn't have put that schedule together unless I believed in their ability to recover.

One of the things that really successful people do when they encounter a problem, they look at both sides of the equation, things that can happen, all the good things and all the bad things that can happen.

When we presented the schedule to our team, that's what we did. We said what could happen if we played the schedule. And obviously they said we could lose them all. We could lose half or win all of them. We wanted to prepare them to understand that there's two sides of the coin and we need to be prepared for both sides of it.

They did an unbelievable job understanding they need to be resilient and one of the things they said in that conversation was we've really got to stick together, we've got to stay connected. They've been able to do that over and over again.

So I haven't wavered from my belief in them. I wouldn't have put that schedule together unless I believed in our team, that we were going to go out and play good basketball. Despite what the record showed, we really played good basketball. We played against great competition with different styles, put ourselves in a tremendous spot to have to grow, and we grew and we grew together.

And the turning point in the season, honestly, I just felt we needed to continue to get older. I thought going and playing against a very good Nathan Davis Bucknell team was really important for us. They improved from a year ago and they played such a physical style, and we had beaten them the year before.

It was a turning point for our team to understand what we needed to do to be at our best because there's a little bit of a hangover when you play the best teams in the country. When you play teams like yourself, where your team thinks we should be okay, the turning point was Bucknell, because it really forced us to have to understand what we need to do to beat good teams. And since that day we've obviously been playing pretty good basketball.

Q. I asked Junior about his height a little bit. I'm sure you've heard it a lot of times, but most of the country is not going to be familiar with him. What makes him so successful, being officially 5'5"?
COACH CHRISTIAN: I didn't know his size. I didn't know he was 5'5". The way he plays out there, his speed and quickness and athleticism, his heart, it's just so special.

When you're a smaller guy, you're naturally going to have a chip on your shoulder, and just want to go out there and compete and show the world the things you can do. But when you're a smaller guy, who shoots 40 percent from 3, can dunk, windmill dunk and do all these other things, the chip comes with some talent.

So that's the guy you've got to have on your roster, when you have a person with tremendous talent and a tremendous chip, there's no telling how good you can be. And as he's continued to get bigger and stronger and lock on winning details, and bringing guys along like Elijah and Miles Wilson, our team not only got consistently better, he's a major part why we're sitting where we are today. His development has been significant over the past few years.

Q. Do you think your players showed you anything new tonight that you hadn't seen before over the course of the season in this special environment?
COACH CHRISTIAN: Great question. I wish they had. We would have switched that down screen on the last play, they would have showed me something new. But they always show me -- what you guys saw there tonight was just how we've played since December. We've just always had great poise, great confidence.

Elijah gets in foul trouble, someone steps up. People that follow Mount basketball have seen that kind of team play game in, game out. And we've done an outstanding job closing games out no matter what.

When you have a group of guys that stay connected through tough times there's no telling where you can be and we're getting a chance to go to Buffalo and play the No. 1 overall seed.

Q. Do you feel the pace and the style of that game was more tailored to New Orleans than you guys?
COACH CHRISTIAN: Yeah, you've seen us play a ton. What we tried to do is tried to build a roster that could play a lot of different styles. When you get in the month of March, when you get in tournament play, it's really hard night in and night out to just go up and down and press and trap, and it just gets hard to do that. So we've tried to build a roster that's built where we've got a couple of turnovers in the press tonight.

But trying to build a roster where if we play a team like this, that's really physical, we can maintain our composure and make plays. I can't say we were built like that two or three years ago. We're really built better now because we can play different styles of basketball. No matter what you're trying to do we can fit in pretty good and find a way. We've got great outside shooting, tremendous heart, speed and quickness, and we've got guys that believe in one another. And that's a really tough challenge for opposing teams.

THE MODERATOR: Thank you.

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