BIG EAST CONFERENCE MEN'S TOURNAMENT

March 6, 2002

Ricky Shields

Gary Waters

COACH GARY WATERS: I felt bad because I thought our team played well enough to win a game. First half, we had a very good first half. Second half we just didn't -- we did some things that we shouldn't have did. It's hard to win a game when you give up 25 offensive rebounds, 26 offensive rebounds and you miss 14 free throws. You just can't win a game like that. To still have a chance to win, that says a lot for our team. But at the same token, you know, we're at Division I level. These are elementary things that you got to be able to complete and we just didn't do it. In my estimation, we gave the game away as opposed to someone taking it away from us. I literally believe that. You know, if we would have just made our free throws and got loose balls, this could have been our game. But, there's a reason why that happens. And that happens because you have experience out there and other guys that's been there and they know what to do to get there. And my hat goes off to Boston College because they never settled for the easy thing; they just kept working it and working it until they could get back in it and do what's necessary. Any questions?

COACH GARY WATERS: My philosophy has always been the same. That's gonna never change. I like substance over flare. I've always wanted that. I've always done that. I'm going to recruit players that's going to be solid people and solid citizens that's going to work hard. And when you do that, you don't worry about all that other stuff. You really don't worry about that stuff. They're ready to leave early, they're ready for this, you just don't worry about that. And that's what we do. We're going to recruit people that you want to know how we recruit? We recruit people to press. We didn't press today because we don't have all of that totally into our arsenal yet.

COACH GARY WATERS: No, they hit a couple of shots and we went man-to-man. People, in your mind, say we could have went zone. See, that's not what we do. The thing that hurt us, in the first five minutes, we even told the team, the first five minutes make the key of this game. The thing that hurt us was they scored three buckets in a row and we missed four free throws. We make our free throws, it's just a trade-off. And you can't -- the biggest thing to have success is to make your free throws. This has been killing us all year. You know, I read an article that talked about the different teams in the conference playing in this tournament. And they said the first ones that will be out of the tournament, "one and done," as they said it, when they mentioned Rutgers, they said Rutgers has done a great job, but they can't shoot free throws. They're the last place free throw shooting team in the conference. Showed again. I mean, the writers know what they're talking about.

COACH GARY WATERS: I don't consider this away from home. I was talking with Perry from Miami yesterday, and his comment to me was -- you know, we were talking about the RAC. He said, "Man, that's a great place to play. But it's not the RAC." I said, "What do you mean?" I thought about what he was saying. He said, "We went in there, it wasn't difficult. Wasn't difficult to play. The Q sticks, the noise. What made the RAC more difficult for us to play there," he says, "is that we were concerned about your guys in the rack. They become different people." The intensity increases and all that. When I sat and thought about that, that's exactly what happens on the roads to our guys. See, they go into someone else's place and their intensity, their level of attack goes up higher, and we don't meet that. We don't stay at the same level. And that's something that's taught, and that's experience. Two things. You teach how to do that, and that's experience.

COACH GARY WATERS: Oh, I agreed wholeheartedly. The other thing I want to tell you, we look at our inability to play on the road. We got to look at eight other teams on the road in the Big East. Eight other teams don't have more than two wins on the road. The road is a hard place to play. The reason why it's a hard place is the things I just talked about.

RICKY SHIELDS: Yes, I believe that. That's something we have to work on. We're a pretty young team. We have a strong senior in Rashod. Not to take anything away from the other seniors. But it's just going to come with maturity and experience, you know, playing away, you know, being able to do small things that it takes to overcome playing away.

COACH GARY WATERS: We just didn't hit some shots. It was not a very good half. You know, we didn't hit shots. We turned the ball over. We missed free throws. You add all three of those up, you lose by four or five points. We're lucky to be that close, how poorly we played in the second half.

COACH GARY WATERS: Yeah, I thought we worked hard. We just didn't work effective. You have to work effective. You know, we had about three fast breaks and we turned the ball over for no reason at all. That takes - I don't want to say experience - that takes discipline. And that's some of the things you have to do. You know, a lot of discipline you get with people. You don't get discipline with just work. You got to find people that are disciplined enough to do those kind of things.

RICKY SHIELDS: No, it doesn't take anything away. People didn't expect us to be here in the first place. I don't want to set a low bar for us and make excuses about why we're not winning right now. But who expected us to be here? We were a basement team coming into the season. I think we did a good job proving a lot of people wrong. We really gained a lot of confidence in ourselves and our coaching staff and our whole philosophy of how we're going to play and continue to play next year. I still think we had a great season. I don't think our season's over yet. The Big East tournament is over. We have a chance to go to the NIT and play there, get back to The Garden. It's a special place to play. I enjoy playing there. We have a lot of more years playing under Coach. As you can see, he turned our program around. Continue to get good players to come in, and we'll be a team to be reckoned with.

COACH GARY WATERS: Well, you know, I'm going to give you something. I wanted to go to the NCAA because that's something that once you've been there, you understand. I've been there a number of times so I understand the difference between the NIT and the NCAA. A lot of people don't understand that. But let me say this. I don't think it's a step downward for this team to go to the NIT, because this is a growing team, it's a young team. What they need is to gather some success. You know, I hope that in the NIT we have the ability to get some home games. If they're at the RAC, there's going to be some great basketball played there. So we're looking forward to it. I'm going to talk to my guys, I'm going to make sure that none of them are down behind this, because we still got more basketball to play - we hope.

COACH GARY WATERS: The only thing that was the most difficult thing for me right now wasn't the loss to BC. Because I felt we played well enough to win that game. It was not being able to play Pittsburgh again. That was a personal challenge of mine. I wanted to have this team do that. Because we never played Pittsburgh playing our best game. I wanted them to see our best game and go out there and see what we could do. And in order to be able to play Pittsburgh again we had to win this game here. We just didn't get it done. You know what, we came in this season with three goals. We had accomplished them, all three. We said we wanted to be 500 or better in the Big East. We did that. We said we wanted to make it to the Big East tournament. We did that. We said we wanted to have a dominant home court. We did that. Next year, we just got to work on some other stronger goals. We want to maintain the things we just said, but we want to move forward in some of the other things.