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NCAA MEN'S REGIONALS SEMIFINALS & FINALS: ARLINGTONMarch 29, 2013Sherwood BrownBrett ComerAndy EnfieldChase FielerARLINGTON, TEXAS Florida – 62 THE MODERATOR: We're joined now by FGCU head coach Andy Enfield and student‑athletes Chase Fieler, Brett Comer and Sherwood Brown. COACH ENFIELD: I have three things to say: No. 1, Florida is a great basketball team. They outplayed us tonight and deserve to win. Wish them luck going forward. No. 2, I want to thank Ken Kavanagh, athletic director, two years ago when he hired me, we sat down and we had a dream of going to the Sweet 16 if we built the program the right way, and we did it in our second year. So thank you, Ken. And lastly, I want to thank our players for an unbelievable season, 26 wins. We made some history and I can't tell you how proud I am of what they've accomplished. Q. Brett, what was Florida fairly effective at limiting what you're able to do successfully offensively? BRETT COMER: They did a great job on not making me use the ball screen. They made me turn it down. They hedged it really hard. I didn't make the right play out of it, like I should have, and it affected us. Q. Sherwood, your thoughts, please. SHERWOOD BROWN: Well, you know, at the end of the day we still made it to the Sweet 16 and made history. And I'm proud of our team. They helped me achieve a goal that I never thought that I would ever reach. So, you know, I'm really proud of the success that we had this far. And I know these guys are going to have continued success in their future. I'm really proud of the way that they came together. I just can't wait to see them on down the road. Q. For all the players, I know the loss is immediate and it's hard to face, but what do you take from this last remarkable week? BRETT COMER: We made history. We did something that nobody in the nation thought we would do. I'm proud of our team. It's been an honor to play with a guy like Sherwood. He came from a walk‑on to conference player of the year, to a guy that's hopefully going to be playing at another level. I'm looking forward to our future. We have a taste of what this is like, so I think we'll be hungry to come back to the same spot and hopefully go even further. CHASE FIELER: Just like he said, we're proud of what we did. We made it to the Sweet 16, no one thought we would. We had a great leader in Sherwood Brown. We thought we could have won, but we lost to a great team in Florida. We're looking at what we did wrong. We'll probably look at film to build off of this for next year. Q. Chase, two things, can you describe first the feeling when you get out to a 15‑4 lead like that and everything is going great and you're hitting threes, and then can you describe the frustration during their 16‑0 run when you guys had so many turnovers? CHASE FIELER: It was very exciting to get out to that big run early, playing in the Sweet 16, playing the way we were playing early in the tournament against a great team in Florida. When they started their run we couldn't ‑‑ we didn't have the energy we did in the other two games. It got us down. We weren't playing with the same energy, the same fire we were before. At halftime we tried to discuss it and get each other going. They are a great team and did a great job of slowing us down, turning down our ball screens, making our plays ran from five feet deeper than we wanted to and just really got us out of our game. Q. Sherwood, Chase mentioned that he has mixed emotions for you, with this being the end. How would you describe your emotions? SHERWOOD BROWN: You know, I would say that, you know, these guys helped me do something that I never thought was possible. They helped me maybe open up some opportunities for the future. And I'm proud of them. It's unfortunate that we lost and that our last game had to end in a loss. Some team has to lose, not every team is going to win the National Championship, only one team can. No one thought we were going to make it this far. And we did what a lot of people thought we weren't going to do. Q. Chase, Brett's taken a fair amount on his shoulders, always has the ball in his hands and makes everything go. Pick‑and‑roll stuff. Talk about Florida, with their speed and quickness, not all on his shoulders, I guess? CHASE FIELER: No, it's not all on his shoulders. I didn't have a great game controlling the ball either. I made some mistakes, our whole team did. Even when he was driving, we weren't moving, we were staying in the same spot. Florida was very active in their defense, rotating and getting to where we were. We made it difficult for him to even find us. We weren't uncovering ourselves, we weren't getting to the open areas, so that was very difficult. Then if he did make it past, we weren't always catching it like we should. We weren't catching it in rhythm to get the easy shot off. It's definitely not all on his shoulders. He played a great game, and still had 7 assists in the game. We've got to do a better job of moving without the ball and moving when he gets into the lane, get to the open area. Q. Sherwood, if not for the improvement of you guys as individuals and as a team, most of the country probably still wouldn't know anything at all about Florida Gulf Coast. Now everybody knows everything about the University, not just the basketball program. You guys have put an entire University on the map. How proud does it make you feel and how cool is that? SHERWOOD BROWN: You know, I'm very happy that we were able to actually do that. FGCU wasn't a very well known school before we entered into the tournament. And now the whole nation knows about it. I'm sure that us with our success has helped admissions. It has helped recruitment. And it's helped a whole lot of aspects of FGCU. And I'm sure we're all glad, I pretty much speak for everyone, that we're happy that we could do that. A lot of big things are coming to FGCU in the near future and we just can't wait to see those. Q. Sherwood, I don't know how much thought you've given to specifics as far as where you might want to continue to play down the road, have you had any conversations with anyone that have given you ideas on what your options might be and how those options might have improved significantly recently? SHERWOOD BROWN: I've been told that my options have improved with the recent success that our team has had. But I really haven't made any decisions on what I plan to do in the future. I look for the guidance of Coach Enfield to help me make those decisions. Q. For any or all guys, what did you learn in the last week? BRETT COMER: I think we've learned a lot here. We learned that we can play with anybody in the nation. We've learned that we can literally do anything that we put our minds to if we come out with the right energy. I learned that these two guys I'll never forget and there will be some memories that will never be forgotten. And that's pretty much it. CHASE FIELER: We've learned that we've got to not only play hard, but we've got to play smart. We had 20 turnovers, they only had ten. That's ten more possessions right there. They had 15 offensive rebounds, we had six. Nine more right there. We take a lot away from that. But like Brett said, we're together, we learned we can play with anybody as long as we play well. And we learned that we're dunk city now, not just Fort Myers. SHERWOOD BROWN: I think the biggest thing that we've learned and probably a lot of America has learned that just believe in yourself, even when no one else believes in you. If you believe in yourself you can pretty much do anything that you set your mind to. Q. Coach, you've spent time in the NBA, has Sherwood played his way into some NBA camp invites? COACH ENFIELD: Sure, as a professional basketball player at some level. That's not for me to decide. The NBA has to draft him or sign him as a free agent or give him a tryout as a free agent. He's certainly a pro. What level of that will depend on his development in springtime and what he does wherever he is. Q. Coach, even when you guys got out to the early lead, the 15‑4 lead, there were some loose possessions where they threw the ball away carelessly. You could probably feel something like that coming and feel that that was going to be the weakness. What were you trying to do to stem that? COACH ENFIELD: I didn't feel it was a weakness or it was coming. We've been playing great basketball the last three or four weeks. We won 14 out of 16 games. I was shocked at some of the bad turnovers we had in the first half. When you go into 12 turnovers at halftime and 8 of them are because you're throwing the ball into their hands and just ‑‑ it was just like ‑‑ it wasn't what Florida was doing, we did it to ourselves. Florida is a great defensive team, but some of the turnovers you can't even make that up. It's hard to imagine our lack of ball skills, but you just can't beat a team with 20 turnovers as good as Florida. We gave them 19 extra possessions and we didn't rebound the ball. We played great defense. We held them to 38 percent from the field. And you have 12 turnovers in the first half, that's a problem. Q. I know it's not easy to, again, in the immediacy of the loss to ask you for the 30,000 foot view, but what have you learned? COACH ENFIELD: It was great for me to see the excitement across the country with the underdog. And it's a surreal feeling when you're the underdog and you're the talk in the nation. We did not plan that going in. We planned to win a couple of games in the tournament, as many as we could. We thought we could compete on a high level. Our plan wasn't to be some great national story. Our plan was to go in and compete and win games. But it was unbelievable to see the excitement and passion of not only our local community and the students but also on a national level. I'm very thankful for that. What Sherwood said about hope, and you can achieve great things, our players believed. And they accomplished something special. Q. Turnovers were enormously costly. Any emphasis on the defensive rebounding for you guys, was that equal to or perhaps even greater of a detriment to you guys, certainly in the first half? COACH ENFIELD: I tried to recruit Shaq and Bill Russell at halftime, but they were busy. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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