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NCAA MEN'S 1ST AND 2ND ROUNDS: SAN JOSEMarch 21, 2019Russell TurnerSan Jose, California MODERATOR: We'll welcome coach Russell Turner to the days. We'll have Coach give an opening statement, and then we'll open it up to questions. Coach, we'll open it up to you. RUSSELL TURNER: Hello, everybody. It's an honor to be here representing UC Irvine, and our basketball program and I appreciate all of you being out here to cover it. Especially excited to be here in San Jose where many of our fans can come join us, fans of UC Irvine can come join us. And I'm also excited because there's so much Virginia flavor here, because I grew up in Virginia and I've lived out here for 20 years now. It's nice to combine the hospitalities. MODERATOR: We'll open it up for questions. Q. Russell, two things, is Worku going to play, and also what do you carry over for last year's Kansas State game that might help you in this one? RUSSELL TURNER: Well, the first one is easy. Yes, he is going to play, assuming nothing unusual happens in practice today. You'll see him out there practicing. He practiced hard all week, and he's excited and raring to go. And I'm pleased that we took care of him the way we did and we now have him back. That helps us. And then your second question, what do we take from the matchup we had with Kansas State? You know, more than a year ago, No. 1, they're really good. They handled us and made the game very difficult for us to play well. They have mostly the same personnel. I feel like our personnel is very different, though. We have a lot of different guys on our team now. In many ways I think we're better. I think our team was young, really young when we played that game last year, and improved tremendously over the course of that season and have improved even more this year. So I don't think the games are going to be similar, at least I hope not. I know that they're going to be -- I know the game is going to be a defensive battle, like we're used to playing in. We're just not used to playing in those battles against teams that are better than we are like Kansas State is. Q. What is the most difficult part of the matchup with K-State just in general terms? RUSSELL TURNER: Well, just their overall excellence, you know, they're the Big 12 champions. They are an excellent basketball team. And specifically, they're excellent as a defensive basketball team, which is often the most frustrating thing to play against, is a team that can just shut you down. We're that team in the Big West. Kansas State is that team in the Big 12, though, and that's a different deal. Q. Coach, when the brackets came out, you guys were kind of picked as that team to beat a high seed. RUSSELL TURNER: (Laughs.) Q. A lot of people were predicting you. How have you kept the guys from kind of hearing that chatter and that talk and keeping them focused? RUSSELL TURNER: There's no way to keep them from hearing it, but I don't think that our guys would be foolish enough to think it means anything. Maybe it only means that people expected Dean Wade to not play. I don't know. Our guys are pretty sharp. They're smart, and they're competitive. You know, so they want badly to be perceived as good. So there's some satisfaction when others seem to recognize that we're good. But we know we've got to perform in a rectangle, and that's hard. It's especially hard against a team as good as Kansas State. So hearing those things doesn't really mean anything, I don't think, to us. We're used to being the hunted in our conference. You know, everybody that we play in our conference wants to beat us. We held up good, we held up well to that pressure throughout the year, and I think we're going to hold up well to the pressure in this environment, too. Q. How do you think the Anteater stacks up against the other 63 mascots in the field, and what we should know about the Anteater? RUSSELL TURNER: Man, that is a great question. It's not even close. We've got the best mascot, I believe. There are no other Anteaters anywhere. We're unique. We're fun. We get people's attention, and I love that because I feel like our university could use more positive exposure. You know, growing up in Virginia, I didn't know anything about UC Irvine, but being a part of it now, I know what an incredible place it is. It's a world-class academic community. It's one of the best places in the world -- in the world -- to wake up every day in terms of the climate, the weather, the community. It's really special. Our Anteater is special like that, too. So I appreciate you acknowledging our mascot. We look forward to representing. Q. Congratulations on the year, Coach. RUSSELL TURNER: Thank you. Q. I'm curious what your comments would be on Mr. Galloway, who has been the Defensive Player of the Year in the league three times. That seems to be a monumental feat. And in addition to that, 18 wins to 30 seems like an incredible jump, even with a couple of two or three different pieces. So I would like for you to tell me why that happened. That's impressive. RUSSELL TURNER: Okay. Yeah, thanks for asking. I love to talk about Jonathan Galloway. You know, to win the Defensive Player of the Year a third time is a special accomplishment, an incredible accomplishment, really, when you think that he was able to win it as a sophomore, first, and then to win it again and again, you don't have that occur unless you continue to improve. You don't win that award unless you're incredibly dedicated and a selfless teammate who lines up every day and stays durable and does a lot of different things to help your team win. So we're really proud of what Jonathan's done. And you guys have the two-time I think Defensive Player of the Year, too. So we know we're facing a perimeter version of him in Brown for Kansas State. I'm excited to see that unfold on the floor. You know, Jon is one of the most improved players that we have since that matchup against Kansas State in Manhattan. And then watching that game, it struck me how much more confident he is now as an overall player and how much better he is for our team. The other part of your question was? Q. Just going from 18 to 30. RUSSELL TURNER: Oh, yeah, going 18 to 30. Well, number one, the biggest factor in that is the schedule. We scheduled in 2017-18 out of necessity a lot of road games that were hard to win against good teams. And when you're forced into having to do that, like we feel like we were because of the success we had, there's a good chance if you have a young team you're not going to win. So our record wasn't very good in that season of '18 and '17, but we played for the championship of our tournament. We played for the championship of the regular season. We were a good team by the end of that season. We just had a hard schedule. But a lot has gone into our improvement. We've added better players to our roster since that game. We've got grad transfer Robert Cartwright who's a fifth-year player for us who's made us better. We've got Collin Welp who red-shirted during that season as a freshman, as a physically not yet fully developed freshmen who was our leading scorer in our last game of the Big West Tournament championship. So we're better specifically with those two guys, and we've also added some better role players. So our team is different. Q. I'm curious, as you prepare for K-State with the Dean Wade issue, do you look more at last year's one or do you watch more of this year's tape in getting ready for that? RUSSELL TURNER: Both. Those guys made an incredible run last year in the tournament, and we respect that. Some folks, you know, indicated that it was a chance they could be better in some ways without him. You're not going to be better without a great player like Dean Wade, but in some ways they're better, they're different than what they were consistently when they had him. And I guess we don't know yet whether Dean is going to play or not, but we know they're a different style team without him and they have different strengths and maybe some different weaknesses, so we're looking at different ways we might be able to give ourselves the best chance to compete and win. Q. Russell, there were plenty of years at Irvine you had really good teams that were not able to get to this point. What does it mean to you as a coach to be able to coach on this grand stage and be able to help your team and school get to this point again? RUSSELL TURNER: Yeah, it's meaningful, Mark, to be on this platform, to be part of this experience. You know, people joked in 2015 that we had put UC Irvine on the map, and I always said, no, we didn't put them on the map, but we put them on the bracket, and a lot of people notice when you're on the bracket, and it gives an opportunity for our university to have positive exposure through incredible representatives of our place, and that's our players. I'm excited for that. You know, we've been close to making it this far a few times, but we accept that it's hard to get here. And that's one of the things that makes it so satisfying, not just for our players but for our fans and our community. So this is special. This is a good thing. There's going to be a lot of people who graduated from UC Irvine to tune in at 11:00 to watch us on TBS or CB -- whatever it is, TNT, Tru. I don't know. Q. Russell, it's been a while, but you spent a lot of years with Mike Montgomery at Stanford, and then the Warriors. I wonder if you could sort of give us some specifics on how he influenced you. RUSSELL TURNER: Oh, wow. Yeah, thanks for asking that, because, you know, I've had great mentors in this game, really great mentors in this game. Mike Montgomery is a Hall of Famer. And, you know, he brought me into his staff without knowing me in 2000, and that is really, really rare. Like I've been like maybe the luckiest guy that I know in coaching, because that happened to me at Wake Forest with Dave Odom, and then it happened to me again with Mike Montgomery at Stanford, and the program that I joined at Stanford in 2000 was impeccable. It was outstanding. It was the most -- had the most solid foundation of any program in the country at that time. And to see how he had built that in a place where others had thought that basketball success was not likely was fascinating for me because it was so different, the way he had done it, than the other coaches I had worked for. And I learned more from Mike at that stage in my life than I had from any other coach. And it's been fun to apply many of those things that I've learned at UC Irvine, because in many ways we're similar. We're academically demanding. We had not had a history of success. There were others in our community who thought that maybe basketball wasn't likely to be good at Irvine where we were, and we've turned that on its head, just the way that Mike did at Stanford. And then went on to do again at Cal. So Mike's influence on me is not one that I can easily measure it's so great, and I'm really, really appreciative of him. Q. This kind of a two-part question. I guess, first off, what are you expecting in terms of logistically? You guys are closer to the arena in terms of fan support tomorrow. And secondly, have you talked to your players at all -- if this is close to the end, people want to see the upset so that this might turn into somewhat of a home game for you guys? RUSSELL TURNER: Well, it's a game in California, which is where we play most of our games. And when we come here to the Bay Area to play, we often have good fan support. And it's not ever been the NCAA Tournament. The NCAA Tournament attracts a different level of support and interest. When we went to the tournament for the first time in school history in 2015, we had an outstanding following in Seattle. And we also played an early game, I think also on Friday. So I'm hopeful that we're going to get great support. I'd be surprised if we don't. It's spring break now at Irvine. Exams are finishing now. I got a couple guys that are finishing this morning. So I'm hoping there's some student support that comes our way because kids can finish their exams and roll up here and start spring break as part of the Big Dance. I think there wouldn't be anything more fun than that. So hopefully there will be a lot of folks here following and we can create a good atmosphere. I don't think it'll be like our home atmosphere, though. I know Kansas State has great following and most of the schools that are here in this sectional have great followings. Q. And following up on his question earlier about the mascots in terms of another name question, where do you think Max's name ranks in the all-name team of college basketball? RUSSELL TURNER: (Laughs.) Yeah, I don't know. I haven't given that any thought. I love Max Hazzard. I know that. And he does have an unusual name. I don't know too many guys with two Zs and an X in their name. (Laughs.) MODERATOR: Thanks, Coach. RUSSELL TURNER: Thank you guys. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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