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NCAA MEN'S 1ST & 2ND ROUNDS: JACKSONVILLEMarch 21, 2010Louis DaleSteve DonahueRyan WittmanChris WroblewskiJACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA Cornell – 87 THE MODERATOR: Coach, if you could please give us an opening statement about the game and we'll take some questions for your guys and then questions for you last. COACH DONAHUE: You know, I just thought in all my coaching, all the experience I had on any team that I ever played on, this game here was as well executed that I couldn't even imagine that we could play that well in the stretches that we did. That's not to say that I don't think we can play well, I just think -- I have so much respect for Wisconsin and how hard they play, how well they defend. These guys did a remarkable job of staying poised throughout every single possession, had great confidence and great awareness for each other and just executed on both sides of the ball as well as you can do. Q. Ryan, can you, I guess, talk about the start that you guys got off to? It was 11-1 before they really knew what hit them, and what was kind of your plan? You came out and it looked like you were looking for your shot right off the bat. RYAN WITTMAN: Yeah, you know, obviously the start is an important part to the game. It wasn't necessarily us trying to start a game plan of getting me shots right away. I think I just found myself in position coming off some ball screens and stuff. I think one was an out-of-bounds play. I think they were just kind of in the flow of the game. It wasn't necessarily something that we said in the locker room that we were going to start out doing or anything. Q. Ryan, has there been another game in your memory where you've had as hot a shooting night, or is that a personal best? RYAN WITTMAN: Probably not. You know, I got a lot of good looks. A lot of credit has to go to our bigs, Jeff Foote is one of the best screeners in the nation. I know our coach always talks about how he just swallows guys up, and that's critical when you play a team like Wisconsin who's always trailing, who's always fighting through some screens extremely hard. I think just about -- it seemed like every one of my baskets was coming off a ball screen or a dribble handoff from him. Q. For Ryan and Lou, can you just address the next game with Kentucky, and do you feel like you can continue to run your offense at such a high level against a team with such great athleticism? LOUIS DALE: You know, watching Kentucky on TV, they're a great team. You can tell that from the beginning. They like to push it, and I think we just want to stay within ourselves and do what we can do and do the things that we can control. We've got eight seniors on this team, and we want to take this ride as long as we can because after this it's just nothing but babies and memories, so we'll just keep going. (Laughter). Q. Louis, what do you think the key to your offensive execution as a team was? LOUIS DALE: I just think we have so many unselfish guys on this team. Nobody really cares how it gets done, and we come out to make plays. And I think we were able to do that tonight. It's just great to play with these guys, and I think the key to our success is just being unselfish. Q. Louis, this game you were pretty much getting to the basket at will. You're obviously not an average Ivy League type player. Do you feel like you as a point guard can compete with any point guard in the country? I mean, next game you're facing John Wall who a lot of people think is the best point guard in the country. How do you compare yourself to guys like that that get all the national attention? LOUIS DALE: Yeah, I think starting with myself and guys on this team, we're all confident in ourselves and what we can do. You know, we all want to go out there and we're going to compete, and we're just going to give it our best shot. As far as playing in the Ivy League versus I guess Kentucky or SEC, I feel I can play on any level, and so it should be a good match-up. Q. Chris, the way this game unfolded, obviously you guys got off to a great start and just played better and better as the game went on it seemed. But you come out in what is probably the biggest game you've ever played in. You have to have butterflies or you have to have concerns. Things start going your way. How much easier is it to play as the game goes on and things start to go your way, and did you guys just get into the kind of flow mentally where you felt like, all we have to do is play the way we play? CHRIS WROBLEWSKI: Yeah, I mean definitely Witt got off to a hot start, and when he's hitting shots like that and Louis is playing like that, it's a lot easier on the rest of us. We got off to a good start, which obviously is going to help our confidence and everything. But I think coach scheduled -- a schedule like we did this year for games like this, so we've been in this kind of environment before. So I think that was a lot easier to keep our poise and composure down the stretch. THE MODERATOR: Guys, thanks a lot. We'll start with questions for coach. Q. Coach, Wisconsin leads the country in fewest turnovers allowed per game. Can you talk a little bit about your team today having fewer turnovers than Wisconsin and what that says about your squad? COACH DONAHUE: Well, I think they obviously didn't turn the ball over too much. I thought they missed some shots. Mixing up the defense was, I thought, a key to the game because they're very methodical in their man to man stuff. I thought our ability to play some different zones made it difficult. You know what, we're not a team that really turns it over a lot, and this game, although Wisconsin is a very good basketball team, especially defensively, they're not a team that really turns people over. I was pretty confident that they hadn't seen a team like us in their league play. The beauty of this tournament is that after you get out of your league play, no one knows you as well, so you're able to do what you really do well, and the other team has to make adjustments, and it's difficult. Wisconsin plays a certain way that's very successful in the Big Ten. I just think we have guys who have different skill packages that make it difficult for them to guard us like they guard most Big Ten teams. Q. In both the Temple game and today, your guys never really had to fend off that run that they may close it to two or three points and then you guys respond. What did you guys do to keep them at bay and sustain that lead throughout both second halves? COACH DONAHUE: Well, I do think getting off to a great start was key. I go back to the Penn game where we weren't ready to go from the start, and we've used that to our motivation, that we're going to deliver the first punch. We're going to go out and make plays. Even if they're bad plays, we're going to make mistakes, great, but we're going to be the aggressor. I thought we did a great job of coming out and really knowing what Wisconsin was going to do. Go out and make plays. Be the aggressor. It just flowed. I don't know why we kept in that frame, we just played great basketball. Looking at kids that played 120 games together that are very good basketball players. They're unselfish and I don't think that's the key. That's one of the keys. The other key is they're talented. These are talented basketball players that are unselfish. Q. Can you talk about those different zones, the looks you gave them, how many different zones you used and why that bothered them so much? COACH DONAHUE: Well, I think Wisconsin is such a deliberate team. They run a swing offense, and I thought if we're going to do something a little different -- we did a two-two-one full court. I think we started out a one-two-two three-quarter court, back to man, and then midway through to first half, we went with a one-three-one, and then we switched into man in the middle possession. It's just another advantage I have, when kids are very intelligent, they can change on the fly. I was able to play guys on the defensive end that are very good at that and then when we got stoppages, get the offensive guys back in the game, and that seemed to work well today. Q. Coach, you're the only team in the field that has actually already played two No. 1s on the road in their place, two of the tougher places in the country to play. Is that going to be beneficial from the standpoint of your team understanding you definitely can compete in that circumstance? COACH DONAHUE: I don't think there's any question. I think those games have already benefitted us greatly. The Kansas environment was a big step for us. That was a huge game. I thought that was a great effort by our guys. I really felt good after that game, even though we lost, and in some ways -- I was not happy we lost, but I thought it would be great motivation to get through our league, and if we got this opportunity to play these type of teams that we would be ready. Now in the NCAA tournament, you get a neutral side, you get great officials. You just really get an opportunity to play your game against teams in a real honest, clean environment, which for a mid major against high majors is very difficult. Q. Could you describe the moment afterwards going into the crowd and being with your family? I don't know who the guy was that you hugged, I assume he was the athletic director at Cornell? COACH DONAHUE: Yeah, that's Andy Noel, who stood by our program for the first seven, eight years when we really didn't do much (tearing up) and had great belief in what we were doing. It doesn't happen a lot in college basketball in particular that someone sticks by a coach for this long, and I'm very fortunate that I was able to reward him for all of his patience. THE MODERATOR: Coach, thank you. End of FastScripts |
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