NCAA MEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP: FIRST ROUND - UNC ASHEVILLE VS UCLA

March 16, 2023

Mike Morrell

Tajion Jones

Drew Pember

Golden 1 Center

UNC Asheville Bulldogs

Media Conference

UCLA 86, UNC Asheville 53

THE MODERATOR: We have the contingent from UNC - Asheville, Tajion Jones, head coach Mike Morrell, and Drew Pember.

Coach, I'll let you start off. Your overall impressions. You ran into a slow start, shall we say.

MIKE MORRELL: You want to take it (smiling)?

Yeah, listen, I mean, they're really good. I did a poor job of getting our team ready for their physicality on defense. Like I told these guys, when you're in this situation, whatever team you play, when you're the 15 seed, is going to be the best team you played all year. That was the case tonight.

I give them a ton of credit. They were the aggressors early, and they took it to us. You got to give them credit for that because they were not going to be caught sleeping.

I thought they were really good defensively. They just kind of really pushed us around all over the floor.

But again, you know, I'm just really proud of our players. I'm really proud of who they are. It's really hard to get here. There's only 68 teams that get the chance to do that.

This guy to my right has meant everything to me. He's meant everything to this program. This guy to my left, he's one of the best players in the country.

I'm going to tend to focus on that tonight and not going to let one game damper what this awesome team has done not only for our program but for our university and for our city and everything. It's just been a really, really special year. Quite frankly, I'm just bummed I don't get a chance to coach these guys together again.

I've never coached one game as a head coach without this guy to my right, ever. That sucks.

But credit to UCLA, they were really good tonight.

THE MODERATOR: Questions, please.

Q. Coach, I know you've seen a lot of NCAA games as an assistant. Was there anything you tried to do to try and prepare these guys for this moment? If you did, what did you try and do?

MIKE MORRELL: Everything I tried didn't work tonight. I will say this. You can talk about it, but you don't really know, you can't really understand it, until you experience it. You can't really experience it until you understand it. That's like a vicious cycle, right? But it's the truth.

I thought Singleton and obviously Tyger and Jaquez, those guys have played in Final Fours and it showed. Again, you got to give them a lot of credit.

I thought our guys battled after we got punched in the mouth early on. Again, there's a reason why there was a 2 next to their name. Some people argued there could have been a 1.

You try to prepare, man. You try to talk about it. But, hey, listen, man, you try to enjoy the moment, too. Like, we're a one-bid league. We were 16-2 in our league. There's only one team coming out of our league. So we're here. We're going to enjoy it. But we also came to compete. We just didn't do a good enough job of that tonight. But it doesn't take away all the great things these guys have accomplished.

We tried, man. We tried to explain what the experience was going to be like. I would say these guys probably would agree that it's a little bit different when you actually get out there and those emotions are flowing.

I wish I'd done a better job of helping them with it, though.

Q. Drew, can you speak to it being your first experience, how difficult it was in the first five or six minutes.

DREW PEMBER: It was tough. We didn't really get the chance to settle in until about the second half. We were a lot better in the second half turnovers-wise. I was. I was extremely flustered at the beginning of the game. Had no idea what it was going to be like. My tenure at Tennessee, I got in for a minute. I didn't really know what it was like.

Getting into the game tonight, those first four minutes, your adrenaline, emotions are extremely high, and I didn't handle that well.

THE MODERATOR: Gentlemen, thank you.