NCAA MEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP: SECOND ROUND - FDU VS FAU

March 18, 2023

Tobin Anderson

Grant Singleton

Demetre Roberts

Ansley Almonor

Sean Moore

Nationwide Arena

FDU Knights

Media Conference

Q. I know there was probably some film study and preparation, but how would you describe what last night and this morning was like in terms of people reaching out to you, students and faculty back home, and just kind of what the last 16, 17 hours were like for you guys?

SEAN MOORE: I personally would say life-changing. That whole game has changed everybody on our team, staff, students, everybody who go to Fairleigh Dickinson University, everything is different now.

Phone has been going crazy, still is. I'm trying to reach back out to everybody. I appreciate everybody out there showing love. So it's most definitely been life-changing.

Q. Demetre, I know you're one of the guys that came with Coach from St. Thomas last year. What was his sales pitch to you? And was D-I always a goal for you?

DEMETRE ROBERTS: I'd be lying if I said it wasn't. Coming out of high school, not having no D-I looks, I didn't pout. I didn't sit around and mope all day. I trusted -- Coach was my first (indiscernible), I trusted him all the way and still with him for four years. And five years later I'm still here. I'm just blessed. Keep going, keep playing the game I love.

Q. Sean, yesterday you said that you were kind of in shock still last night, and none of this felt normal to you and maybe would feel normal a day later. How do you guys feel, and how do you balance the elation of last night versus trying to get ready and playing another game tomorrow night with a chance to go to the Sweet 16?

SEAN MOORE: It's going to be hard. We beat the No. 1 team in the country. The NCAA Tournament most definitely going to be hard. Just gotta put that game behind us and get back to business. There's still business to be done. We've just got to put it behind us, celebrate later, just worry about tomorrow's game.

Q. Did you guys have a chance to go back and watch the game from last night, and what did you think, if you saw any highlights or anything? It's one thing to be in it but then to go back and see what it looked like, what went through your mind if you saw any clips from the game?

DEMETRE ROBERTS: What game are you talking about? Our game?

It's everywhere. Obviously, I think the big shot that Fuzz hit at the top of the key was the game-changer. That was a dagger right there. That was a good one right there.

Q. After the play-in win, the message from Coach was let's go shock the world. We feel like we can beat these guys. Did he have a message for you guys last night or today as you get ready to play FAU?

GRANT SINGLETON: Just staying focused and locked in. It's hard to top what we did last night. But we are just trying to keep a level head, stay humble about the situation. We have more things to do. We want to keep dancing. So just staying focused.

Q. You seemed really loose during warmups. Like you had a belief before you went out there. I'm not sure who it was, but somebody missed a dunk to kind of end the warm-up, which didn't like seem like a good moment or whatever. But was there just that -- did you go out there with that belief you could do what you did last night?

ANSLEY ALMONOR: Yeah, we felt we could beat them ever since we were watching film, trying to prepare for them. We always try to go other there and be loose for our warmups, be confident, have fun out there. We're all close, we're like brothers. That was just a regular game for us. We felt we could go out there and beat them, and that's what we did.

Q. How does it feel to know that you helped put FDU on the map? I'm sure there are people out there before yesterday that never heard of the university, didn't know where it was, didn't know anything about it. And now, in college hoops, at lesion, it's all anybody's talking about. How does it feel to leave that mark regardless of what happens tomorrow?

SEAN MOORE: Honestly it felt great. Fairleigh Dickinson always had a great reputation in the past years. They've been here before and years before that.

Even though they've had a little bit of a slump for the past couple of years, but it felt good to put them back on the map and show that FDU is still here, and put it on for Jersey. Felt good.

Q. For you guys that have been with Coach for a little minute, how would you describe him?

GRANT SINGLETON: As you can tell he's a fast-paced guy, really up-tempo. But he's amazing. That feeds off on us how we play, just the confidence that he has in us. It's one of a kind. It's his spirit. He's really uplifting. He believes in all of us. We believe in him.

DEMETRE ROBERTS: One thing I will add to that -- I haven't told him that, but I like the way he was able to handle things, first time being at The Dance. Usually he's like out of his chair. I won't say he's yelling, but these past two games, he's shown he can stay composed. I don't think he gout out of his seat one time. He just let us play. Win, lose or draw, he's happy we're here. Like I said, we're playing to win. I'm really proud how he's handling things.

Q. There's some coaches who might be Division I players and then they go immediately and start coaching at their alma mater or get a D-I opportunity right away. For Coach Anderson to kind of grind his way from D-III, D-II, to D-I and have this moment in his first D-I season, what do you feel for him or the happiness you might feel for what he's gone through to get here, because it wasn't instant gratification like going to D-I right away?

SEAN MOORE: I feel great for him. He kept doing what he was doing, kept going at each pace, each level -- D-III, D-II, D-I -- just staying humble, doing what he do best, stay in the moment. Do what you do and the future is ahead of you. So he just kept his head on straight and stick to what he knows. That's why he's here today.

Q. Ansley, Sean said his phone was blowing up. When did it sink in with you that you did what you did, or has it yet?

ANSLEY ALMONOR: It still really hasn't completely sunk in, but yesterday, when I got to my phone, he said my phone was blowing up, on fire, hundreds of notifications. People from years ago texting me I haven't heard from years. People texting me congrats, a whole bunch of stuff. It was crazy. I've never experienced anything like that.

COACH ANDERSON: Obviously been a good day for us, enjoying all the publicity and all the notoriety from the win, trying to settle ourselves back into the fact that we have to go play a terrific team tomorrow, Florida Atlantic.

I was impressed watching them. Their skills are unique because you don't get to scout in person. Where I come from, Division II and Division III, you can scout in person. To see them in person last night, watch them on the floor, just impressed by Dusty, what a great job he does with his team.

They are a true team. They're unselfish, they share the ball, a lot of interchangeable parts. You can see why they're a Top 25 team, tough and strong and physical.

They're not as big, obviously, as Purdue and some teams we've played. But they are aggressive. I know they're a heck of a challenge for us just to compete. And I'm sure they're the big favor, we're the big underdog.

But I was impressed watching them, really impressed with them, really impressed with Dusty and his team and his staff. You can tell they'll be ready for us. That's one thing watching them play, they'll be prepared and we're going to have to play very well to compete.

Q. You get the laundry squared away, first of all?

COACH ANDERSON: (Laughs) I hope so. I gave it to my wife, just wash a few things for me. She's in charge of that. Hopefully I'll have some more clothes when I get back because we're in dire straits right now.

Q. What's the message to the team? Obviously you had a message to the team, we can do this, after the play-in game. What's the message now as they're basking being the toast of college basketball? But also at the same time you guys have a chance to go to the Sweet 16 tomorrow?

COACH ANDERSON: I think we're in pretty good spirits. My message has been let's -- what we did last night was special, let's go do something else that's special too. Demetre and Grant, our back court, have been -- every time, every year we've had a Sweet 16, they've been in a Sweet 16. There's not an NCAA Tournament they've not been in a Sweet 16 in Division II. They're used to it.

I talked to them after the game last night after the game, hey, make sure these guys know we've got more to do. I don't sense from us any sense of complacency or sense of satisfaction. We're very loose today, focused but loose.

And that's kind of how you have to be this time of year. Obviously we're -- we're sore. Our big guys are sore. Banging against Zach Edey for 40 minutes can wear you down. Our big guys are definitely sore. But we'll try to get them into the rehab stuff and get them all prepped up for tomorrow.

But I think the ball goes up tomorrow night, we'll go be ready to compete. I don't sense anything from us. But we'd love to get back to the Garden and play in the Sweet 16. That's still something you can't even imagine. That's still way, way out there.

But you're 40 minutes away, and we're not going to talk about -- we talk about four-minute games, possession by possession, play well, compete, do what we do. But I think we'll be ready to go.

Q. I forgot how many people I knew from Siena, Le Moyne and Clarkson until this morning. What did those years at those schools do for you and prepare you for this?

COACH ANDERSON: I'll tell you what, I've forgotten how many people I knew from those place too. I've got, like, 1200 unanswered texts right now. The problem each time I look at my phone it's more and more.

My message, if anybody's listening, stop texting right now. Give me a chance to catch up.

Those years were incredibly important for me to be at places like that. You're at Clarkson, a Division III school. I was 27 years old as a head coach and I had to learn how to run a program, how to coach a team. And I made a lot of mistakes.

But the beauty of that is there's not a lot of eyes on you. You can screw something up and you're not being held accountable by a lot of people. End of the game, you didn't do this right, or how you handled a certain player, or what you did. I learned a lot for making decisions.

And those places you have to do everything as a head coach. There's not one thing you didn't have to do. You had to order the food. You had to get the hotels booked. You had to handle the practice times. You had to deal with the women's team, the volleyball team, the teams are coming in there. All that stuff was on you as a head coach. So you learned to do a little bit of everything.

You have to be a great communicator. I've gotten a lot better at that as time went on. You've got to talk to people all the time. And you've got to work with people. And what it did was it gave me a way of how we wanted to play.

And I had that from my father. We knew we would play, when you see us play it's all motion offense. That comes from my dad. It comes from Bob Knight's Indiana motion offense. My dad -- Indiana motion offense.

And I've tweaked it a little bit. But I formulated a way how we want to play, how we want to recruit, how we want to run the program. So we know, we got this job last spring and I brought two assistants with me. And I've had great assistants the whole way through.

We knew how we wanted to do things. There was no, like, what's going to happen here? 90 percent of the decisions were already made. Then you have to go figure out how does it apply to guys you have there now.

So it gives you a chance to kind of form a blueprint how you're going to do things. I think that's been a huge, huge part of our success.

And this is the third program I've taken over, Clarkson, they hadn't been .500 in 24 years. That's hard -- 24 years of being under .500. We went over .500 our first year. I was 27 years old. We had a couple good seniors. Ended up having success.

Turned the program around, won 19 games and won a conference championship. Went to St. Thomas Aquinas, where they had won 15 games in three years, the three prior years. Turned that around. We were in the NCAAs for seven straight years. And now FDU.

I've kind of done this before, you know? And it's hard. But I'm used to the hard stuff. When we lost to Hartford this year, we went to Hartford and lost, I wasn't discouraged. It's just part of the process. It's going to happen.

And I thought the process would take longer. I wasn't discouraged, or we didn't panic. We just said we've got to keep grinding, keep working. Just keep doing what we do. And keep building the program and doing things the right way. And let our players feel like they're important, they're getting better. And those years are so important.

I look back all the time -- I told my wife, it's hard because I'll get in a game and we'll be like three minutes to go and we're up by six. And I'll think to myself, this reminds me of the game we played St. Lawrence and we were up by six and we lost.

It's like a bad -- let's not let that happen again. Every game reminds me of something, you know? Last time was kind of on its own, kind of a special thing. But too many games -- I've coached a lot of games. There's a lot of memories in there, a lot of things. But I can still go back to those things and it helps me out a lot.

Q. For those who know about FDU, those letters are synonymous with offense. And yet over the last four games you have played the best defensive stretch of your season. How is it that you were able to get the players to hit that switch? And part two to the question, you've won these first two games with Singleton and Roberts not having to go off on a scoring binge. What does that tell people about your team?

COACH ANDERSON: Two good points there. Our defense has been not very good all year long. My team's always been known for our half court -- we press, we force turnovers but always play pretty good half court defense.

We've not done that this year. We've tried everything. We've worked. We've taught. We watch film. It hasn't clicked. We kept saying at some point it's going to click.

And somehow, either we're running out of time, the year's going to be over, but we really guarded the last four games. Our defense has gotten better. And I know you can't win in the postseason without playing good half court defense. And we didn't do it for the first -- we did it at times.

There's been some games we played good half court defense. But we finally started playing 40 minutes consistently here the last four or five games. And that's been a big key to our success.

And with Roberts and Singleton, I thought Singleton was great last night because he didn't score a ton, but, man, he rebounded, he got loose balls. I think he had five assists. Look at Grant Singleton's assist-to-turnover ratio. He's like 4-to-1 or 3-to-1. I think he had five assists last night, no turnovers.

Roberts, Roberts did some things, he wasn't perfect but he did a lot of things. He put so much pressure on the defense. He's always in attack mode.

Those two -- and I thought Ansley Almonor last night didn't score a ton. He scored a bunch against Texas Southern, he scored 28 against Texas Southern. But he scored two last night. But his post defense and his rebounding, boxing out, was great.

So what makes you good is a lot of guys are contributing right now. A lot of guys are doing different things. We always tell our guys, find a way to help us win on your worst night. So if you're not playing well, not making shots, find a way to get loose balls, take a charge, make the right pass, make the right play. But be able to do something for us when you're having a bad night. And I thought that's been great so far.

Ansley, a bad scoring night, but he was terrific in other ways. Roberts and Grant, at some point I would expect them to go off a little bit, too, but I think they're both playing very, very well. We're going to keep playing them. We're going to keep riding those guys.

Q. The fact that Zach Edey is such a unique individual means that there had to be such attention to detail with the game plan because those guys knew exactly who the focal point was going to be at all times. How do you try to get your guys to generate the same level of concentration, the same attention to detail when there's not an obvious Zach Edey on an FAU roster as you get ready to play them?

COACH ANDERSON: The keys change every game. Obviously last night was a great post player, an unbelievable, All-American post player. So that was the thing there.

Florida Atlantic, the keys will be different. We've got to get back in transition. They're very good in transition. We can't give up 3-on-2s, 4-on-3s, 2-on-1s. We can't let that happen to us.

They get us in transition -- I told them today it's got to be zero or two points in transition. Make them play the half court.

Then you've got to contain penetration because they shoot a lot of 3s, they make a lot of 3s, they get their 3s off penetration. We've got to guard on the perimeter and stop the penetration.

We're just going to change the keys. Now, game plans are awesome. Every coach probably has a good game plan. If the players don't really listen and actually do it -- that's one thing -- you're proud as a coach, they were locked in last night. Our game plan on Edey couldn't have been better as far as our attention to detail. There was not one possession where I thought he got something easy and we broke down.

So I think the guys are really locked in right now. I think now with our keys to Florida Atlantic, transition defense. They're also a very good rebounding team. They're not huge -- they're still bigger than us; who is not bigger? There's five guys in the hallway bigger than us.

But we've got to box out, rebound, be tough, be scrappy. We have to be that way tomorrow night.

And they're also a good defensive team. We're down to the last 32 teams. There's a reason -- these teams are all good. So it's like we have to play a good team here. And on paper, they're better than us. How it looks, the two teams that have a better season than us.

We'll have to play really, really well, compete our tails off and hope they're maybe not quite as sharp. That's just the way it is. And it worked last night. We're hoping that it will help us tomorrow.

Q. All you guys have gone through this year what would it mean to play a Sweet 16 at The Garden?

COACH ANDERSON: That's a question you wouldn't even fathom being asked two weeks ago. Definitely not two months ago. It would just be incredibly -- what's the word? I'm an English -- I was an American studies major at Wesleyan. I went to a pretty good school. I don't have words to describe what that would be. It would just be a remarkable achievement to do that, to get to a Sweet 16 in the Garden.

So I told the guys before Purdue, I said, you know, this is going to be hard. This is going to be -- to beat Purdue is going to be really hard. Just like it's going to be hard, an unbelievable challenge, but we're here. There's an opportunity here. They're champs. 40 minutes to go make it happen. So just to get here is incredibly special. We have an opportunity, let's go try to make it happen. Let's see what happens. Hang around. Make it a close game. Make it a four-minute game and see what happens.

To have this opportunity is really special. And now let's go see what can happen. And if we've got a chance to go to the Garden and play in the Sweet 16, I wouldn't have to fly back to Jersey, I could jog back, jog back, take off running, be like Forrest Gump or something. That would be incredible.

That's kind of beyond our wildest dreams, a bit like Hoosiers, to do that. But we've got a lot of work in front of us. You can't think that far ahead. We always think about the next day, the next breakfast, the next film session. That's what we'll keep on doing, just keep on focusing on that and go compete tomorrow night.

Q. When the players were up here, they talked about how everything in their lives is different now for the team, for the athletic department, for the school. And all the coaches that are still here have big tasks at hand. But recruiting in the portal never stops. People still trying to find players for next year and always building the roster, can one win do that for you, open new doors for you and change things for FDU in terms of exposure and the people that recognize your program and know who it is and where it is?

COACH ANDERSON: Absolutely, without a doubt. I mean, this kind of success helps the school, the program, the community, our players, obviously. And a lot more of my texts have been returned the last 24 hours, a lot more people texting me potential players texting me.

I like the guys we have now. If you look back at our history, I don't want to say anything -- but we've been able to keep our guys. I think guys enjoy playing in our program. We give them freedom to let them play.

It's a players-first program. So at St. Thomas Aquinas, we had really good players there. Kept saying why don't these guys leave for Division I. They had fun. What about last year, if I stayed at STAQ, those guys were all coming back, Demetre, Grant and Sean were all coming back to finish up. Pretty good at Division II. Had a chance to be pretty good at that level. But they're all coming back.

I love the guys we have now. They're very special. I think we're going to lose, obviously, some good seniors. Going to lose Grant and Demetre and PO and Danny. But the guys here now are -- we've signed five seniors, five high school kids for next year. I do believe in building the program with guys who are high school kids who get better, who grow with the team. Obviously with the landscape you've got to plug in some portal guys, plug in some transfers, but I like the guys that are back. I like the guys that we have signed.

And I think a lot of these guys will come back. And once you're here, this is wonderful and you want to keep on getting back here.

I can see why -- and then it was like Division II, the same thing, once you're there, just keep making this happen. But we're getting a lot more -- my whole staff, they're more involved in recruiting stuff, but they're, like, a lot more guys are calling us and texting us back now than they were before, obviously. It definitely helps us all. I'm happy for the school. FDU is a great school. Great place. Wonderful people.

Our president has been unbelievable. I don't know how many basketball games he saw before the last month. He's on board now. He's all fired up. He's all excited. He's a tremendous supporter. He's out here -- he drove out here. He's hanging out last night, the whole thing.

And we just have great people around us, which makes it wonderful. So I'm happy for them. And our school's, the same kind of thing we are, small school, trying to make a name for themselves and trying to make an impression on the community, things like that. And we're great at community service. We do a great job with people around us.

And so I'm very proud of what we've done for the whole school. To have the whole arena last night chanting "FDU" and all the notoriety on social media and all that stuff is just wonderful. Great for a lot of people.