NCAA MEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP FINAL FOUR: BAYLOR VS GONZAGA

April 5, 2021

Corey Kispert

Lucas Oil Stadium - Unity Court (South)

Gonzaga Bulldogs

Postgame Media Conference

Baylor - 86, Gonzaga - 70

THE MODERATOR: We're joined by Corey Kispert.

Q. Could you explain to us what it feels like to lose the last game after winning all the others and coming that close to winning the national championship?

COREY KISPERT: You kind of forget. You really do forget what it's like to lose. And every time it happens, it doesn't feel good. And thankfully I've had not very many of them over my career, whether it's in the regular season or in the tournament.

But I mean, when you come up against a team like that who is just firing on all cylinders for 40 minutes, it's really hard to compete with. So, yeah, you kind of forget and it doesn't feel good. I'm going to remember this for a long time.

Q. They hit you guys pretty hard early on. What do you think went into that? They were clearly the aggressor quicker on the (indiscernible). What did you see?

COREY KISPERT: That's how you have to play the game. Especially in this kind of a place, in this environment -- the more aggressive team gets more calls. The more aggressive team makes more 3s. The more aggressive team gets more rebounds. And they punched us in the mouth right at the get-go. And it took a long, long time for us to recover and start playing them even again. But then it was too late.

Q. During that last huddle, after the game it looked like Drew Timme was telling you something as he was talking to the entire team. What was he saying?

COREY KISPERT: He told us that he loved us. And he wouldn't change a single thing. He loved playing with this team. He loved fighting with us every day. And he wouldn't want to do it with a different group of guys. And Drew's been so authentic with us the entire year. It was nice to hear it from him.

We all know the kind of special group this was. And the kind of ending that we thought we deserved. And Drew's been at the point of that. Coming out of his mouth, it was really special.

Q. You talked about what Drew's comments were too. How do you encapsulate the season that you guys had? And what will you take away from it after you get past the disappointment of tonight?

COREY KISPERT: The word that comes to my mind is "grateful". I'm so grateful for being able to wear this name on my chest, and so grateful to all the people who made this season happen in Spokane. And I'm grateful to our guys for sticking with it through the very end. And a lot of the days weren't easy. There were a lot of really tough ones. But I'm looking back and this has been by far the most special six months of my life.

And I'm just so, so thankful that it turned out the way it did just from top to bottom. Had so much fun. And what Drew said, I wouldn't trade it for the world.

Q. A long great career at Gonzaga. How do you want people to remember you as a Zag?

COREY KISPERT: I just want people to remember how much I cared, how much I cared about the red and blue. You know, being a Zag is much more than just the 40 minutes you put into the time you spent on the floor. It means being a great person off the floor. It means being a great son, a brother, a great friend.

And I want people to remember me for being able to do all those things as good or better than I've played on the floor. And I'm hoping that little kids out there look at our team and look at me and realize they can kind of make it and do it the right way, too.

Q. Certainly I don't think tonight unfolds much differently if you were undefeated or weren't undefeated. Wonder if you could reflect back on how maybe, how that made you, the collective weight of that as the season went on. Do you think that impacted the season at all as the year went on?

COREY KISPERT: No, as Coach Few said, he said it a million times, that we never really talked about it. And that's the truth. By the time we got to this tournament, you know, every team wants to go undefeated. So didn't really cross our minds. And like you said, us being undefeated or us having lost eight games, it wouldn't have mattered.

Q. Your team has been a dominant force all season long. It was a rare sight going into halftime for your team being down by ten points. What was the message that Coach gave to your team going into the second half?

COREY KISPERT: He was positive the last ten minutes we put together. We were plus nine, I think, in the last ten minutes of that first half. We were doing some really good things. We finally started rebounding and turning them over a little bit. We were finding Drew and Anton on the pick-and-rolls and stuff like that. And finding things that worked.

And the message was kind of keep stringing those things together and keep sticking to our plan and kind of shave that lead down as the second half went on. And again, Baylor came out and punched us in the mouth in the second half, too, and the credit goes to them for doing that.

Q. Obviously once the dust settles for this, looking ahead toward playing at the next level. But I want to know, what are you going to do immediately next when you're able to; maybe spend time with your family for a while? What's the next couple of weeks look like for Corey Kispert?

COREY KISPERT: See my family, see my friends, and get away, get away from basketball for two weeks and rest. I think more than any year, this year has been an emotionally exhausting one, even more than physically exhausting. So my body feels fine. I don't really have any injuries this year.

But no matter how often you hoop or at what level you hoop, you've got to take time off. You've got to take it away and recover mentally. And this year was a grind for us. And so the next two weeks looks like a lot of relaxing and a lot of decompressing.

Q. Could you kind of describe what it's like to play in a game like this when the opposing team is so aggressive and things are clicking so well for them, for you guys, what is that experience like; how does it feel versus other games you've been in?

COREY KISPERT: Just not letting you do the things you normally do. I'm so used to kind of, if that happens, we take that punch and move on and kind of get on with the game and just fight back, really go out quicker than we did. I'm kind of used to that reaction time being a little quicker. They did a great job of slowing that up and obviously their numbers from the field made it really hard for us to claw back in.

Q. As you take a look at the entire season, what have you learned most about yourself, what have you learned about the coaches and learned about your teammates dealing with circumstances like COVID and what you guys had to go through literally, like you said, for the last six to seven months?

COREY KISPERT: That's a great question. There can be a lot of good that comes out of a bad situation. I know if you trace it back to March 6th or whatever, last year, when the whole thing canceled, it felt like there's a lot of bad things that could have derailed me and derailed us. But in life and in basketball, you know, joy doesn't come without a little bit of suffering. You know, you can't have one and not the other.

It's about dealing with those painful moments in your life and finding joy in those. And that's where real happiness comes from. And I'm so thankful for the way that the team handled adversity and handled suffering all year long. And I'm definitely a better person because of playing this year under the circumstances that we did, taking punch after punch, I guess, from the world. And this team stayed strong all the way through.