John Kuckel Quotations

If we could sustain the effort we got in the second half for an entire game, we'd be all right. In the final 16 we played our butts off, but tonight Hyde hit their open looks and free throws, and we didn't box out well enough the entire game to limit their second chances.

Give Westbrook credit. Those kids play hard. They don't quit. They did the same thing to us at our place when they got us. They play tough wire-to-wire. They could have rolled over. Teams are well-coached in this conference and they all play hard every night. And if you don't play hard for 32 minutes you're not going to get a W.

I say this game was very indicative of our season...really up and down. We played a great first half and it seemed like we got a little comfortable in the second half.

Our focus the last two or three days in practice has been stopping people. That's all we talked about coming in. We wanted to be able to defend and I thought we defended as well as we could in the first half.

Unfortunately, we finished one game short of where we wanted to be. The seniors did a nice job with the situation they had. They had a new coach come in pretty late in the game. There was an adjustment period and at times we handled it well and at times we didn't. We have a great group of younger guys coming up. Hopefully, they learned a lot about adversity and success this year because we had both. Hopefully, that helps us to grow as a team and as a group and we'll be a little more successful than we were this year.

It was a physical game and we saw that in the first quarter and we talked about it in the huddle. We like ourselves in a physical game. We think we have some big guys that can bang.

That's really the defensive effort we've been looking for all season. Hopefully, it's a sign of us coming together. It's our first road win and we're at the point in the season where we badly needed it. The kids realized that and showed up with a slightly different mentality then we've had the last couple of games and it showed on the court.

In the past we've been running the floor just in spurts, today we consistently got up and down the floor. We try to get the big guys down the floor and Sullivan, Pratt and Sierpinski did a great job of that today. We're a much more dangerous team when we're getting up and down in transition then when we're playing slow.