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NCAA MEN'S 1ST AND 2ND ROUNDS: ORLANDOMarch 15, 2017C.J. BryceChris FlemingsDenzel IngramKevin KeattsOrlando, Florida THE MODERATOR: At this time, if we could have a show of hands for questions. Q. Denzel, could you give us some perspective on what it's taken over these two years to have the success you've had under Coach Keatts and build to get back to this point where you're in the Tournament. DENZEL INGRAM: When we came here, Bryce was a freshman, and we were transfers, and we were sitting out. It all started in practice. He just had a winner's mentality. We believed in him. Ever since then, we've been rolling, and it feels good to be back. Q. Chris, when you study and start to look at the pack line defense and what Virginia does, what challenges does their scheme present to you guys? CHRIS FLEMINGS: Like I said, they're definitely a good defensive team. We can't over-drive. We have to try to make the easy pass and get ready to knock down shots. Q. The 5-12 game, I'm sure you've heard the success that 12 seeds have had: I think 49 times since 1985 a 12 has upset a 5. Have you guys talked about that at all or maybe what upset or spoiler you guys could play this week? C.J. BRYCE: We haven't really talked about it much. We feel we can play against any given team on any night. We just have to play our game and our style of play. Like you said, their style of play is slower than ours. We just have to push the ball and get out on misses and makes. CHRIS FLEMINGS: We really don't look at what the seed is. We look at it as another team. They've got to come out and play, the same way we do. DENZEL INGRAM: Yeah, pretty much to piggyback off them, we haven't really been focused on that. Just sticking to the scouting report and ready to execute. Q. In terms of that pace of play, how do you guys go about getting a team like Virginia sped up? And is there anyone that you compare them to that you played this year that really wanted to be slow and deliberate? DENZEL INGRAM: JMU plays slow. The College of Charleston plays slow, kind of the same style of defense, hard hedge, and really just want to force the tempo by pressing, you know, getting after it, making shots, and putting them on their heels versus us being on our heels. Q. Chris, do you guys draw confidence from the game you played last season against Duke, taking them to the wire on this stage? CHRIS FLEMINGS: Definitely confidence and motivation and just the focus and the experience of being here before and know what we need to do to win. Q. Denzel or Chris, this program does have a strong NCAA Tournament history but had a rough patch there before Coach Keatts got here. How have the expectations changed? What have he and his staff done to shift the expectations for you guys? DENZEL INGRAM: Pretty much when he came in, he was like, "We're going to win championships. So do whatever you got to do to buy in and play hard and work hard for each other." I think we delivered on that. CHRIS FLEMINGS: He changed the whole culture when he got here. They had some rough seasons, but since he's been here, he's been winning, focused on winning and us getting better every day. Q. Everyone talked about Virginia's defense. I suspect you guys would like to play a little defense yourselves. How good a defensive team are you? THE MODERATOR: C.J., can you start. C.J. BRYCE: I believe we're a very good defensive team. I believe we showed it in our conference tournament, especially against Charleston in the championship. We want to showcase it again tomorrow. CHRIS FLEMINGS: Defense is definitely a focus for us. We definitely try to get stops and turn that into offense. DENZEL INGRAM: I think our style of play on defense, the way we get after people and try to force turnovers and force tempo really affects teams. I think that will be helpful for us tomorrow. Q. C.J., just how different is this environment from the average, everyday environments? And how much do you draw on last year, and do you feel comfortable in this environment now? C.J. BRYCE: Yeah, I definitely feel the experience from last year has helped out a lot, especially with the veterans we have back this year. We just want to take it as another game, prepare the same. I think we did a really good job at preparing at practice this week. I think we'll be ready for tomorrow. Q. Denzel and Chris, what kind of a teammate is Jordon Talley? What's he like? Give me a quick scouting report on this game. What's he do well? CHRIS FLEMINGS: He's definitely a great teammate. Always pushing us in practice. Definitely a great defender. Can't let you know the scouting report on him, though. [ Laughter ]. DENZEL INGRAM: He gets after it. He plays hard. He plays with a lot of passion. He's great on defense. He's a great locker room guy. He's a guy you need on your team. THE MODERATOR: Gentlemen, thank you very much. We'll bring Coach Keatts up when he's ready. Good luck, gentlemen. We're joined by Coach Keatts. We'll ask Coach to make an opening statement. KEVIN KEATTS: We're extremely excited to have the opportunity to play against a very good Virginia team. When you look at us, we're proud to be back into the NCAA Tournament. I felt we learned so much from the game we played against Duke last year. I think our guys are prepared and ready to go. We have a lot of respect for Virginia. Obviously, Tony has done a tremendous job with their program. When you look at it, they're one of the best defensive teams in the country. We've got to do a lot of things to be able to score against those guys. We've had a tremendous season. I'm very proud of these guys. When you think about having a target on your chest all year long, being picked number one, and obviously winning the regular season and a tournament championship. 29 games is impressive, and we're excited, once again, about our opportunities. Q. You learned so much from Duke last year. What specifically were those lessons? KEVIN KEATTS: Well, I think, if you came in the locker room after that game, you would see our guys are really disappointed -- disappointed because we really felt like we could win the game. And a lot of times as a mid-major, when you come into this tournament, you're excited to be here. For us, we felt like we could have won the game. I will tell you this now, we've taken that game, and our guys went to work in the spring and the summer, and they've gotten better in a lot of areas. We've got some guys who played in that game last year, who look forward to another opportunity. Q. You mentioned your offense. Devontae is shooting almost 80 percent from the floor, which would shatter the national record. What allows him to finish so well around the rim as often as he does? KEVIN KEATTS: I've got to do a better job of getting him the ball if he's shooting 80 percent, which is good. No, he's done a tremendous job. If you look at -- I can pick a lot of guys off our team, but if you look at probably the most improved guy, I think in the country, it would be Devontae Cacok. He allows our offense to flow, probably one of the best finishers I've ever had as a coach. I like to compare him to Montrezl Harrell, who we had at Louisville. Also, Kenneth Faried. He's really good around the basket. He knows how to finish. He plays with a motor, and he runs the floor well, and a tremendous offensive player. Q. You've done a great job all season long of keeping out the noise for the team from the preseason expectations to throughout the regular season. Does that ever become more difficult once the Tournament hits and you become a trendy 12-5 upset pick? How difficult is it to keep the noise out this time of year as opposed to regular CAA play? KEVIN KEATTS: That's a great question. I say this all the time, we literally just concentrate on the next game. This group, we've got a weird bunch. I love this group. It's the best group I've ever coached. When they get on the bus or plane, five minutes from when they get on the plane, you don't even know they're back there. They don't get caught up in -- though I know they read social media and they're on Snapchat and all that Twitter stuff, I don't think it affects those guys at all. We try to stay in the moment, and that's been great for us because, when you play in a league like the CAA, you've got so many good opponents, and you've got to really just focus on the team that you're playing. Q. Coach Keatts, just a question for you: Obviously, you being a Lynchburg native growing up in that area, your thoughts and feelings about the University of Virginia basketball program when you were growing up? KEVIN KEATTS: Well, it's a tremendous program. You hit it. I was born and raised in Lynchburg, Virginia, and when you're in Lynchburg or you grow up in North Carolina, you don't know anything about -- the only things you know about is the ACC, and I was fortunate enough to know about the ACC and the CAA, when they had Richmond, Old Dominion and George Mason in their league. I have a tremendous respect for Virginia. It's a beautiful campus, it's an hour and 15 minutes from where I grew up. I actually got a text from Ralph Sampson today. Q. I have to ask, what did the text from Ralph say? KEVIN KEATTS: I couldn't figure it out. He said, "Call me." I don't know if he was trying to get information from me or not. I've known Ralph for a long time. Unbelievable guy. What a college career he had. I'm not going to call him back until the game's over because I don't want to be put in that situation where he may ask me some questions. Q. When you talk about Virginia and the style of play, a couple of your guys mentioned JMU and other teams that you've played that try to slow the pace down. What are the things you have to do to kind of play the game at your pace and not let it get into their style? KEVIN KEATTS: Well, I don't know that -- and here's the weird thing, all the tape that I've watched on those guys, I don't know that you can speed them up, but that being said, we're going to try to speed them up. I think we've got to do a good job of trying to get out and get some fast-break points. I think you have to have a lot of player and ball movement. I think their defense is best when you're just standing around a lot. I do think that we've got to try to get in and press. What's tough about pressing those guys is that, if you don't score, you can't press. That's the tough thing about it. This is probably the best defense that we're going to face since I've been at UNCW. Q. Coach, I'm curious, you mentioned the experience last year and how you've seen the team grow. Are there any experiences, any moments along the year you can share where you say, hey, this doesn't happen if we're not in that situation last year? KEVIN KEATTS: I thought, here's the crazy thing about this team -- and I've got to go back to the Duke game for this, is that we don't panic when we're down. There's always a calmness, and we go into it -- when we go into huddles or if we're down at halftime, there's not a panic to us because, in our mind -- obviously, after playing the game/winning the tournament and doing it the same way this year, we always feel we have an opportunity to win the game because, obviously, we press a lot, and we're in great shape. So we feel in a 40-minute game, towards the end, it will turn towards our favor just because of our conditioning. Q. If we could take a bit of a long view, not just on Virginia, but over the last couple of years, how you've been able to build this program back, what does that take in terms of your expectations, your style? How have you been able to get UNCW back to this stage? KEVIN KEATTS: That's a great question. When I took this job three years ago, the first week of practice, I thought, what did I just do? I was obviously leaving Louisville, where we went to two Final Fours and a Sweet 16. One thing about those guys that were in the program we inherited, you could tell they wanted to win. Certainly, what I didn't do was I didn't go out and just take whoever was available and just try to fill a roster. So we basically played with seven or eight guys, but I knew, in order to win, we had to get those guys in great shape. After that, I had three guys that were sitting out. Those three guys became really special players for us the second year. Add in with the guys who had won 18 games the first year, then we win 25. Then the two sophomores, C.J. Bryce and Devontae Cacok, you add those guys and how better they've gotten, and then you've got UNCW right now. We worked extremely hard. I told these guys at the beginning that we wouldn't make excuses. We'd play extremely hard. As I said before, we wanted to pride ourselves on being the best-conditioned team in the country. Q. Kevin, what's your philosophy on graduate transfers? And what has Ambrose brought from Old Dominion? KEVIN KEATTS: Well, I didn't like it at first because, obviously, it typically works against the mid-majors. We were fortunate to land Ambrose because we had some connections with him playing at Hargrave Military Academy, where I was a coach there. So it's been great for me. It's a tough deal if you're a coach, especially at the mid-major level, because I think it comes down to people being able to recruit guys off of your roster. We lost C.J. Gettys to Rutgers because he's a fifth-year graduate transfer. That said, I'm very happy for C.J. because of the opportunity he had to go play high-major. For me, I think a kid should be -- if he graduates and he wants to go, I think every coach should accept the fact that the young man might not want to be in your program anymore. Not the case for C.J. Gettys that he didn't necessarily want to be at UNCW, but I think he wanted to look at other opportunities, and I'm okay with that. Q. Coach, you referenced Louisville a few times. I'm just curious what you've taken from Coach Pitino, not just style of play, but preparing for tournament play as well? KEVIN KEATTS: I thought you were going to take a shot at Coach Pitino about UVA, and I wasn't going to answer that. As you know, Coach has got a tremendous sense of humor. I did call him and said, "Do you have any advice about playing UVA?" And, of course, he said, "The best thing you should probably do is call Notre Dame." Obviously, Notre Dame just beat those guys. He's great. When you talk about a professional, you want to talk about a guy who's won National Championships and been to many Final Fours and a lot of NCAAs. I think the best thing that I've taken from him, to enjoy the ride because that's a good thing. We don't take this for granted. When you think about making the NCAA, I've been fortunate enough to be part of five of those, three at Louisville and two here, and it never gets old. When your name's called on Selection Sunday, that's a beautiful thing. Q. Kevin, two, and they're unrelated: Jordon Talley, what's he like in the locker room? What's he like to coach? What's he meant to the program? And you touched on Hargrave. What did you take from that experience, and how did that help you get where you are? KEVIN KEATTS: Jordon Talley is a great energy guy. He's done a tremendous job. He was the first guy I brought in, the only guy I brought in that first year, and he was a starter. To his credit, he's obviously been okay with a guy like Denzel Ingram starting and coming off and playing a great role for us. He's becoming a great point guard for us. I thought in the CAA Tournament a couple weeks ago he did a great job of running the show, and pick and choose his moments and stuff like that. What a great defensive guy. He's a very emotional guy. Sometimes that's great, and sometimes we've got to kind of settle him down a little bit. We love Jordon Talley. When you look at it, he could go down as the winningest player in the history of UNCW. He's got three regular season championships, two tournament championships, and he's been to two NCAAs. As far as Hargrave goes, what a great experience that was for me. I spent 12 years there, and of those 12 years, I was the head coach for 10 years. During those 10 years, I learned a lot. I had a chance to make out practice plans. I had a chance to call time-outs. I had a chance to make mistakes when nobody cared. We had great players that came through the program. That place is dear to my heart because certainly it gave me the opportunity to really grow as a basketball coach. Q. I want to ask about Chuck Ogbodo. Sometimes it's the unheralded players that help a team advance to the next round at the NCAA Tournament. Chuck has been here for four years, or at UNC-Wilmington before you got here. There were talks of him transferring but didn't happen. It wasn't an ideal start to his senior year. Then he's played a key role in some games. What's your thoughts as he gets set to finish his career at UNC Wilmington? KEVIN KEATTS: I thought he's come along lately and done a great job. What's happened to him is, obviously, because Devontae Cacok is playing so well, a lot of people try to get him in foul trouble. He's gotten in foul trouble a few games, and I have to give Chuck credit, as a guy who's been buried on the bench, as a guy who's a senior, he's come in the game and given us great lift. He's playing really good basketball. I've been telling everyone, I've been saving him for this moment. That's why I didn't play him so much earlier. Q. Kevin, was there ever a time that you thought you would be at Hargrave for the rest of your career? What prompted you to make the move to college in Louisville? KEVIN KEATTS: That's a great question. I don't know if all of you guys know, at Fork Union there's a legendary Coach, Fletcher Arritt, and he just retired four years ago. At one point, I thought I was going to be Fletcher Arritt. And that was the best thing in the world because Fletcher stayed there over 40 years -- tremendous person, tremendous mentor. He's done a lot for prep school basketball. That being said, after a couple years, I had the opportunity to go to Marshall, and I was young. All I saw was Division I, and I jumped on it and had a great time at Marshall, worked for a wonderful man in Greg White, but honestly, I missed it. So I wanted to go back and work with the guys at the grassroots level. So I went back for eight more years. Eight great years. We had a great record. I sent a lot of guys to Division I. We helped a lot of guys academically and to grow as men. But I got the call of a lifetime when the job opened up at Louisville. It's hard to say no to Rick Pitino, especially, you know, obviously being a Hall-of-Fame coach and all that he's done for basketball and so many coaches and players that he's mentored, and I had to take it. I'm glad I did because, without that opportunity and that experience, I probably wouldn't be here today. THE MODERATOR: Coach, thank you very much. Good luck. 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