NCAA MEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP: FIRST ROUND - KENNESAW STATE VS XAVIER

March 16, 2023

Amir Abdur-Rahim

Terrell Burdon

Chris Youngblood

Greensboro Coliseum

Kennesaw State Owls

Media Conference

Q. I'm curious the mantra, no ego. How much did that have into the philosophy of the program helping turn around, and how long does it help to you buy into something like that?

CHRIS YOUNGBLOOD: Really, it's taken us probably the past couple years to buy into it because talent has really never been an issue with us. Be one, no ego means stay together. It's easy to get an ego when you're losing or when you win. That's probably the most part important for us.

TERRELL BURDON: Being that I've been here from the start, it's always been preached pretty well that nobody cares about who gets the credit or where things go. Like nobody cares about who scores, who gets the most assists. We just want to compete as a team and build on something special.

Q. Chris, how would you describe the way your team plays, the way that you guys want to play?

CHRIS YOUNGBLOOD: Man, so really I would describe it probably the most physical, most passionate team on the court at all times. And like I said, the question before, the most connected team of all times, and that's what's been so special throughout the year and led us to all these wins.

Q. Curious about the specific matchup. You're a four-guard team, they play with some bigs. Where is your advantage in that? How do you look at it?

TERRELL BURDON: We like to push the pace, play with a fast tempo, go up and down. But then again, we want to be smart with our shot selection and just be smart on both ends of the floor. Pretty much play fast, try to pick them up, just pressure them, just the little things.

CHRIS YOUNGBLOOD: Yeah, like I said before, although we play four guards, man, we're pretty tough. That's never going to be a problem, like being out there, like being more physical than us, so we'll be fine.

Q. What was your first interaction with Coach, and how have you watched him grow as a coach over the course of your career?

TERRELL BURDON: My first interaction, it was actually pretty great. I remember I was getting that phone call. But just getting to know him, being that when he got here, I got here, just seeing his growth and my growth at the same time, what he has done not only for me but as the program in general, it's just been special to witness and be a part of. And I'm happy for him helping me become the man I am today.

CHRIS YOUNGBLOOD: My first interaction was kind of interesting. It's when he had first offered me, and I was leaving the gym. It was an AAU tournament, and he was calling me. And I wasn't fixing to answer immediately because I had had a bad game, didn't want to talk to nobody. And I knew it was a college coach just by my look. And he was looking at me not answering the phone, and I answered on the last ring. He's like, hey, man, you're just going to dump my call like that?

I was like, I waiting until I got some good service, but I was really mad.

Q. Guys, coming in as massive underdogs, what kind of attitude do you bring into the game Friday?

TERRELL BURDON: We're still bringing the same attitude we brought every other game, being that nine times out of ten we're considered the underdog. We're just embracing it, and we're just going to stay connected to one another and just feed into other brother.

CHRIS YOUNGBLOOD: On paper, we're underdogs, but within our team and in our head, we're never the underdog. We always stay confident, and we're a pretty good team.

Q. What can you tell the people that don't know much about Kennesaw State, just what makes us special as a program and what makes our university special?

TERRELL BURDON: Kennesaw, I want to say it's a special place. Being that I'm from Georgia, I'm from the Cobb area, I feel like Kennesaw has always been overlooked from people in the Atlanta area. When you think of Atlanta, you don't typically think of Kennesaw, but I feel like Kennesaw is a special area and special teams have came through here and are continuing to come through here.

I feel like our culture in terms of student-athletes and students in general, it's unheard of. You would only have to go to Kennesaw to understand, so I advise everybody to go ahead and go out there to Kennesaw.

CHRIS YOUNGBLOOD: I think when you watch us play, you're going to see there's a chip on our shoulder at all times. Because the question before, we're technically an underdog on paper, but we don't see ourselves as an underdog. It's all the stuff we've been through the past couple years, man, it's time.

Q. For both of you, what stands out about Xavier? What have you noticed in watching them or preparing for them?

CHRIS YOUNGBLOOD: Xavier is a real solid team. Their starting five is pretty solid, got some great guard play, very physical team. Pretty solid team.

TERRELL BURDON: I could just see the hunger and the excitement in them. Like they want to do something special there, as well, being that they're well-coached, and you can tell they're fighting for one another. Like they're passionate about what they're doing. Any team like that is a pretty good team to be playing against.

Q. Is there a sense of pride -- when you look at the state of Georgia and the programs in there, and Kennesaw is the one that's representing the state, how do you look at it? Is it a sense of pride or you could care less about what the other schools are doing or don't want to get too big of a head?

CHRIS YOUNGBLOOD: I think naturally, you want to be the best team in your state, but then -- that wasn't our goal at the beginning of the season, to be the best team in Georgia. It's just something that happened over time and just happened naturally. It's definitely pretty cool, but that's not the ultimate goal.

Q. Chris, how do you approach a week like this going through something totally new and different and trying not to be, I guess, blinded by the brightness of the moment?

CHRIS YOUNGBLOOD: Yeah, that's crazy you say that because last week I was asking myself the same question, so I'm asking people that's been there before. But probably the most important part that's helped me is probably my coach because he's been here multiple times. So just pretty much trusting what he tells us, trusting what he tells me and just take it to heart.

AMIR ABDUR-RAHIM: Well, good morning, everybody. Appreciate you guys being here. We have a saying in our program, be where your feet are. To be sitting here on a Thursday morning with an opportunity to play in one of the greatest tournaments in the world, man, I'm going to make sure not only myself but our team, we're going to be exactly where our feet are.

With that being said, I'll go ahead and open it up for questions.

Q. I wonder how you balance that it's wonderful to be here, this is the greatest tournament in the world, but hey, we're here to do a job. How do you balance that?

AMIR ABDUR-RAHIM: Well, another little saying we have in our program, for us it's the same old boring habits. We try to teach life through this game of basketball. And I think the most successful people in the world, they have a balance about them that no matter how big of a stage it is, it's still the same ol' boring habits that prepare them for success.

So that's what we talked to our guys about this week. Guys, this group has played in games at Creighton, at Iowa State, at Florida, at Indiana. I could go on and on and on. The stage is a little bit bigger, the lights are a little bit brighter with it being the best 68 teams in the country, but for us, we've been in this position before. We're just going to keep trusting our same ol' boring habits to lead us to success.

Q. You've coached and played at all different levels of college basketball. What do you learn with that kind of career that maybe not everyone else in your position would know?

AMIR ABDUR-RAHIM: I think if you're intentional about what you do and you have a real reason for what you do, you learn that it's about the person, not the player.

I think if you develop the person -- all these young men, my hope for them is that when they leave us and they go into whatever career field they choose, whether they play professional basketball, whether they become a CEO of a Fortune 500 company one day, whether they become an entrepreneur, that they know how to be professional.

What does that mean? It means being on time, respecting people's time. It means no matter what you do, you put your heart into it to give somebody the best service, the best product you can.

I think over the years what I've learned, a guy can develop a jump shot. You can work ad nauseum to create good mechanics for a jump shot. But for him to be confident to shoot that jump shot in a game and trust the work he's put in, he's got to be a strong person first, and that's what I've learned over the years.

Q. We know you guys are undersized. Talk about me about how you contain a player like Jack Nunge who can be a force in the paint and score from outside the perimeter?

AMIR ABDUR-RAHIM: Hey, look, Xavier is a really good team. Coach Miller is one of the best coaches in the country, has been for a long time. When I was an assistant at Texas A&M, we competed against his teams at Arizona two straight years. He's had guys like Nunge before: Hunter, I know Freemantle is out it seems like. But he's always had really good players.

But for us, again, I go back, we played at Indiana, we play at San Diego State, at Florida against Colin Castleton, and we've played against some really good players this year. For us, yeah, we may give up a few inches in size, but we've got big hearts at Kennesaw State. We've got real good fight at Kennesaw State.

No matter what happens, our guys know we're going to lay it on the line. And like the boys said before, our goal is to be the most connected team in the country. So going up against a good team like Xavier, a good player like Nunge, it's nothing new to us. So we're going to do it as a team. It's not going to be one guy that has the task of trying to slow him down. We've got to do it as a team. That's why we're here, because we were connected as a team.

Q. I know you're well aware of how much your guys care about this. What was it like to sit in here and watch them up there and get reminded of what this kind of means to them?

AMIR ABDUR-RAHIM: That's the reward. The journey is the reward. I wasn't going to miss that part of it for anything. My SID me Mark Wasik told me you can hang here, you won't go on at 10:35.

I remember Terrell Burdon as a freshman when he wouldn't talk. I could literally give him a play call, hey, man, this is what we're running. He's walking the ball up the court and the other four guys are looking at him like, what's the play call? I'm like, Terrell, you've got to tell them the play call, right? To now watching him up here in front of these bright lights talking about his teammates and Kennesaw State basketball.

Chris Youngblood is a really confident kid, just naturally, it's who he is. But to see him get a little bit nervous, if you're in front of these -- like that's the reward.

It's been really cool just watching these guys grow, watching them become men.

People talk about how much coaches help players. Man, I'm probably the luckiest coach in the world, and I mean that, because I have kids who -- when I was a first-year head coach, man, you think you know what you're doing, you have no clue. Your patience isn't very good, and these kids have allowed me and my staff to coach them in every way possible.

The thing I'm most proud of outside of our team GPA over four years being a 3.0 is we've kept our core group in the transfer portal age. We haven't lost them. That's real relationships. To sit here and watch them is part of those real relationships.

Q. The team you started the season with is probably not the team you have now. What have you seen change? What has that progression been like?

AMIR ABDUR-RAHIM: Yeah, from a basketball standpoint, you saw the change become -- normally -- or I should say when we started the season, say a time-out comes. They're waiting for us to come in the huddles and tell them, hey, these are the adjustments we need to make. This is what we need to do, so on and so forth. Even all the way down to the play call.

Now when we come in the huddles, I probably have to sit there and wait about 45 seconds for them to get done talking about the adjustments, what happened on that last play, what they need to clean up. And Terrell, again, for a guy that I could give him a play as a freshman and he wouldn't call it, to now, hey, Coach, what do you think about this? Let's look at this play right here. Chris got it going and or Demond is doing a really good job. Let's go with this.

Terrell, call it. It's your team. You got it.

So that's been the coolest part about this group growing together. They have been really connected.

Q. What was it like growing up with 12 siblings?

AMIR ABDUR-RAHIM: Competitive (chuckling). Really competitive. Everybody knows about my brother Shareef and his playing career, and he's probably the best man I know. But I have two older sisters, Amina and Qaadirah, who -- Amina played college ball at Clark Atlanta University. Qaadirah played basketball throughout high school, but ran track at U.C. Berkeley for a few years.

Shareef was always bigger than I was, so there wasn't a whole lot of playing one-on-one against Shareef, but my sister Qaadirah when we lived in California, she would come pick me and my little brother up, take us to the park, and she would wear us out. When I sway wear us out, wear us out. Like, I'm going home and I am steaming mad. Because, one, I'm young, I couldn't beat a girl. But she was my sister, too, and she'd rub it in your face.

Growing up in our family, it was really competitive, but you also had built-in cheerleaders. You had built-in support. No matter what you were doing, man, good or bad, you were going to have a lot of love after whatever game or track meet or whatever it may be. It was awesome. Wouldn't trade it for the world.

Q. What can you look to accomplish in this final practice?

AMIR ABDUR-RAHIM: Again, I hate to sound like a broken record, but it's the same old boring habits. I want to say this like in part to that question. Xavier, you think about their program, it's not just this team. They have a tradition in college basketball that you could put up there with anybody. I'm sure they're going to have a ton of fans traveling. But you can go back to when Coach Miller was there the first time or Coach Mack or whoever it may have been that has coached that program. There's a certain toughness that comes with that program.

That's the one thing we've made sure to share with our guys this year or this past week is that when we go into this game, yeah, we've played against tough teams before, but this is their brand. This is who they are, and we have to be at our best.

When we go out here today, I know some teams come in here and they just kind of -- it's like, we're going to get after it. We're going to prepare. But it's the same old boring habits we've had all year. Doesn't matter where we was, whether it was on the court in Greensboro Coliseum or in a ballroom in Louisville, Kentucky. We prepared for the game and we let the chips fall where they may after that.

Q. Can you talk about the journey from your first year there were some struggles to now you're making the NCAA Tournament, lots of bright lights. What are the steps you've had to overcome to get here?

AMIR ABDUR-RAHIM: That's a great question. First, I was just telling a buddy of mine the other day, if the challenges of a job don't excite you, don't take it. Being from Cobb County, being with the high school 15 minutes from campus, I remember when Kennesaw State was two buildings and it was Kennesaw College. To now we have 43,000 students, we're an R2 research institution, and we're rocking and rolling in Kennesaw, Georgia. But that first year, the challenges -- we live in this and work in this microwave kind of culture now in collegiate sports where administration and -- they want it to happen like now, okay.

The truth of it is is like Steven Covey said, it's the law of the farm. You've got to water it, you've got to cultivate it in order to reap that harvest. Coming from where we had to set a culture, set a foundation, set a standard and going through that process, even in that one-win season, I tell people all the time, we won that year because Terrell Burdon and Armani Harris are the two guys who have been with us all four years. They knew what our standard was going to be. They became the story tellers to Chris Youngblood, Kasen Jennings, Brandon Stroud, so on and so forth.

The challenges were -- they were challenges, right, but I was really blessed to have a great AD in Milton Overton, a really cool president in Pamela Whitten, who hired me, and now Kathy Schwaig, who believed in our vision, who saw what we were doing, not only on the court but in the community, in the classroom, on campus.

The truth of it is those challenges are what shaped us. Those challenges are what allow us to be here today. People ask me, hey, would you change anything? The only thing I would change is my patience, but I wouldn't change anything about it because you have to go through those things to do something special and be in a special place like we are today.