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NCAA MEN'S 1ST AND 2ND ROUNDS: JACKSONVILLEMarch 20, 2019James JonesJacksonville, Florida THE MODERATOR: Talk about how your regular season ended to get into the tournament here, your second time being in the NCAAs, correct? JAMES JONES: Yes, it is. We're real excited to be here, obviously. We had a great end to our regular season and our tournament with a couple of wins over two really good Ivy League basketball teams, and we felt all year that we were the better team in the league, and I thought we proved it in terms of our non-conference and our win-loss record, and it was great to be able to prove it on our home floor and get ourselves down here and into the NCAA Tournament. Q. James, could you walk us through the recruiting process for Miye and how he ended up at Yale, and was there ever a time when you wondered maybe if he would go elsewhere when the recruiting picked up? JAMES JONES: Well, I believe it was after his senior year, we got a call from Robert Icart, who was his AAU. Coach, BTI, I believe, out of Southern California, and he said he had a kid that we should really take a look at, and he said there's some film on him. I took a look at the film, and the first time in my career I ever offered a kid after watching the film, and it wasn't even a game, it was like a highlight. But he had done some things in the highlight tape that were just so exceptional. I was born at night but not last night, and I could figure it out. So we offered Miye, and he and his father flew out to Yale on their own dime, and they were supposed to spend like a half a day with us, and they got mixed up in traffic, and I believe they visited Columbia and Yale and Dartmouth on the same trip or Princeton, whatever the case, so they only spent like an hour and a half a Yale. We sat down and talked and I had a good feel for them and I thought they had a good feel for me. Shortly thereafter he had gone to Stanford's elite camp and they didn't offer him an opportunity and after that he committed to Yale. That was somewhere in April or May of his senior year, and then in July he went out and he played in Las Vegas in Fab 48, and he played better than anybody I've ever recruited in a summer tournament. They played against Thon Maker's team from Canada, and it was Miye and a kid Cohen, who is at Lehigh, were the only Division I players on their BTI team, and they ended up beating them, and Miye was absolutely tremendous. Johnny Dawkins came up to me after the tournament or after one of the games, and he goes, "Guys, you've got a good one, I made a mistake on him," because he was just that good. His father is committed to education, and Miye is committed to education, and although other people came in recruiting him, they had committed to us, and they kept their commitment because of the people that they are. Q. Could you just talk about once you had gotten the job, could you talk about the challenge in the Ivy League? Everybody is very familiar with the traditions that Princeton has established there, that Penn and Harvard has had their run. How tough was it to come in and sort of crack that and sort of become the standard bearer, if you will, for that league? JAMES JONES: Well, I was an assistant coach for Dick Kuchen for a couple years, and while being at Yale, I understood the power of the name and what it was all about and what a great institution that it is. So I was at Ohio University as an assistant coach when the job opened up and I interviewed, and my thought process after talking to people, they were wondering why I would want to go to Yale. Out of 310 Division I teams, Yale was ranked 308 when I took over the job. They would ask me that question, and my answer would be, "Because it's Yale." I felt like if I couldn't convince young men that we could win and that they were going to get the best education in the world, then I was probably in the wrong business. And I felt that Yale was such a great place academically, and I felt really good about what we were going to do basketball-wise that we could convince people that we could make special things happen. And in getting to it, the biggest challenge we had was we had no basketball history. You walk into our gym, there wasn't 40 banners up of championships. There wasn't several guys who played in the NBA or whatever the fact may be, so we had to start our own history, and we have, and we've done a great job with that, and I've had wonderful assistant coaches who have gone out and beaten the bushes and found young men of quality academically and athletically to help us win championships, and we finally got our programs to the point we're going to be good every year, and I think that's the challenge. We've been fairly consistent since I've been a head coach at Yale, and this is my 20th season. We've finished in the top half of the league 19 times, and the only time we didn't was our first year, when we finished 5-9 and were in fifth place. That's the worst we've ever done since I've been a head coach, and that consistency has been pretty good, but we don't want to be consistent; we want to be great. We want to win the league most every other year, and hopefully we continue to try to bring in quality student-athletes like Miye, Blake and Alex and have a chance to win every year. Q. I don't expect you to get into your game plan here at a press conference, but you've been known for playing an up-tempo game. This might be the best collection of athletes you've gone up against but also the slower tempo has given them trouble this year, teams like Florida. How do you go about doing that? JAMES JONES: Well, certainly LSU is a very athletic team. We did play Duke this year. They're not bad I heard. So we have seen -- and this collection of guys that you're talking about, they've had some schedules over their four years at Yale, so we've seen some players. One of the things I did last night was I watched our Baylor game, it's on my laptop, and I like to look at it every now and again to make myself feel better about my life (laughter), and I watched the game, and we played them straight up. We guarded them man-to-man in the post, we didn't switch, we didn't double. We did what we normally do. And we were able to do that because we were good enough. I think this is a really good team, and offensively we're pretty good offensive team, as well. We shoot -- I think we're like sixth in the country with field goal percentage offense. So that being said, we want to play our basketball game, and if that's good enough, it's going to be good enough. It's not, it's not. But we want to play our basketball team and we want to be the team -- we want to be true to who Yale basketball is, and we're going to go out and try to do that tomorrow. Q. You've got a local kid, Austin Williams, on your team. Doesn't necessarily get a whole lot of minutes, but whenever you call his number, seems like he goes out there and produces. What does that say about his character? JAMES JONES: Well, listen, we had a game against Princeton at Princeton, and we got into a situation where we needed to call his number. I couldn't get some guys out of the game and both post guys were in the game from the start until about the 12-minute mark, and we normally have one post sub, and that's Paul Atkinson off the bench, and if I would have left another guy in, they would've been in for 10 or 12 straight minutes. That's more than I like to give them. So we called Austin's number and he proceeded to go in and score a couple of baskets for us. It speaks volumes to the character of his. You don't know how hard it is to go to practice every day and not play in a game and reap the benefits, and sit on the bench and wait for your number to be called. But what you do is you come to practice every day so when your number is called you're ready. You know, Austin has done that for us, and he's been a tremendous kid. One of the hardest things you do as a coach is to manage expectations because everybody has expectations. I was better than anybody I ever played against; just ask me, right. So everybody feels that way. And I have a locker room of guys that feel the same way, so it's important for us to make sure that everyone knows they're vested in what we do, and just because you don't go out and score the points and get the rebounds or make the assists, you still are really important to Yale basketball and what we do, and I believe that Austin feels that way, and that's one of the reasons why he's able to go into the game and having played in like six or eight or ten in a row and able to be successful because he's worked hard for his opportunity and was just waiting for it. Q. You have four different starters all in double figures, obviously Miye Oni is your leading scorer. For people that don't get a chance to watch too much of Ivy League basketball, what is Miye like and what is it like to have four players that might be in double figures every night? JAMES JONES: Well, Miye might be the most competitive kid I've ever coached. He doesn't like to lose at anything, and he'll bite, scratch and claw to get a win, right, he's one of those kind of kids. So that being said, it's tremendous to have him in the locker room with us because he keeps you on your toes. If you're not ready to go, you're going to get hurt one way or the other. In any event, so it's great to have him as part of it. And having a well-rounded team of guys who can score -- I have basically seven starters, like Azar Swain and Paul Atkinson come off the bench but they're starters. They play starters minutes. They're good enough to start on most every team in our league, and we're fortunate to have a really good basketball club and have those guys part of it. And when I say they're all starters, whenever any of those seven guys are out of the game and on the bench, I'm trying to find a way to get them back in the game. And we have some other guys like we talked about Austin Williams and Eric Monroe who come in and help us from time to time. But those seven guys are really tremendous, and it's great to have a well-balanced team are any one of those guys can give you 20 on any night. And as you look over our last five or six games, Miye has been a consistent scorer and so has Alex Copeland but we've had other guys lead us in scoring too - Blake Reynolds and Jordan Bruner have been a huge part of what we do, and Azar Swain goes out and goes 4 for 5 from the arc against Harvard in the championship game. So we have a lot of guys that can hurt you. So it's great to have that kind of balance in your offense so you can win games. Q. You talked about the Baylor game, do you let the players watch it or did you show that to them? JAMES JONES: No, that's the personal thing with me. I have it on my laptop, I have it there so I can watch it any time I want. Every now and again I'll just take some pointers from it. I like to see what we were doing and how we were successful. Q. Going back to that, how much do you think just going through that experience with your three senior starters, Blake and Trey and Alex, how much do you think that will help them going through it again? JAMES JONES: Well, I think that once you go and you win it and you break that lid, you kind of believe. It's hard to achieve if you don't believe. So I think our guys in the locker room are confident about who they are and about the guys that are sitting next to them. So if you have a belief that you can win, it's got to start there. So there's no fear in the guys' eyes, and we watch some tape of LSU play yesterday and I saw some guys twitching a little bit when they saw a lob dunk or Naz going up and tipping it back in, or Skylar hammering it on somebody's head. Again, we've got some pretty good highlights from our club as well. I think there is a lot of confidence in the room and it is derived from wins that you've had in the past. Q. Bobby Phills was quite a legend at Southern University there in Baton Rouge, the teams he played on and everything. What's it like to coach his son, and what are some things you can share about his son to those watching back in Baton Rouge? JAMES JONES: Yeah, Trey Phills is perhaps one of the better people on this planet. He's the kind of guy you want your daughter to marry. I don't know if you have any daughters, but if you do, try to get his number. You'd be happy to have him as a son in law. Tremendous person, tremendous kid, tremendous basketball player, tremendous athlete, and is just -- he's kind of the glue of who we are. What I mean by that, his task every single game is to guard the team's best player, and whether that be the 1, 2 or the 3, Trey has got him, and everybody knows it. To be that selfless person, to go out and just to defend, because after every single game that every kid has ever played, the first question they're asked, how many points did you score. Not who did you stop, not how many rebounds you got, not how many assists; how many points did you score. So knowing that's going to be the case and knowing that he's not the kid that's going to score the most points every night, it takes a very selfless person to be able to go out and do that, and he's one of the most selfless, hardest working kids that I've ever coached, and it's been a joy. And lastly here, I have four seniors, and I've taken some time here, most every single practice over the last -- we've had like 100 practices so far this year. Over the last I'd say 30 to 35, I made a point to try to grab a smile with each one of my seniors for some reason or another, just to talk to them individually because they're going to be gone in a year. And sometimes you get addition by subtraction. That's not the case with these guys. It's going to be subtraction by subtraction. We will be lesser of a team when they graduate, and Trey Phills is a big part of that. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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