Paul Sather Quotations

What a great soccer game. I thought my kids really deserved it. I thought we had them on their heals most of the game. We didn't have that many chances offensively, but,boy, when we needed it, someone stuck it in the net. What a great feeling to be heading the finals.

We're frustrated and we should be. How many times do you have to go through this? How many games is this now that we could've won? We play pretty well, but it's not good enough for me and I don't think it's good enough for them. When we play playoff teams, we need to play a lot better.

We're starting to get that feeling we need to bring our working boots every day and be ready to play. It was such a good win. I'm so proud of our effort.

Basketball is an up-and-down game. You have to be able to handle runs.

I think we have to realize that we lost six seniors. You can say what you want, but next year we won't have six seniors. We will be young and have new faces. We can't go into next year thinking that we will be able to repeat finishing second in the conference and go to the conference championship again. We have to understand that it might take a little time.

I think it's our best style for us. We probably play our best in that style.

It gives him a whole new dimension when he knocks down a three. He can go strong to the hole and find gaps. When they have to go out there and really pressure him to take away his three, it allows him to get to the rim more or create for others.

Our goal was, as the season went on, to get better. I think we did that. When we finished our year, I do think we were playing some of our best basketball at the conference tournament.

People have been asking me if the boys (were) ready to play. We were going to find out. It's that time of the year. If you want to keep playing you have to step up and make plays.

I think in a lot of ways it was successful. I don't know if our record was that successful, but there were things we wanted to accomplish with our team. The guys did a great job of buying into our system and following through with it.

We have the opportunity for two playoff games at home. A lot was on the line (Saturday).

When you're not very good at something like free throws you need some things to go your way to offset that. For such a poor job of shooting free throws we needed something to happen.

We were really fortunate to win this game. It's too bad because I thought in that first half we had so many missed opportunities.

Fate had it that he was going to hit those threes.

They are all good players and they all brought different things to our team.

It was disappointing. But not that we lost the conference regular-season (title). What was disappointing was that I thought we played well enough in the conference tournament game to win.

It's something new for us still to be ahead by three goals. It takes a while to get that instinct to really finish somebody off. A pretty easy game, really one that we're dominating I thought, then we let up a little bit.

I keep talking about the lessons that we're learning. And here's another one. You just don't give up on anybody. ... Maybe we're not quite as good as we think we are sometimes.

In the first half we tried a few times. But we were poor on the defensive block outs. You have to get a stop, or create some turnovers. They didn't turn it over much in the first half.

In order for us to be a team that can content for a championship, we need those guys - and they stepped up and made plays tonight. We had some guys that had some rhythm going and that really helped us.

If you want to keep playing, you have to make plays, defend and rebound.

I don't want to take away from the fact that we played really well. Games like that, where you are trying to beat a team that's ranked and at home, you need to minimize mistakes.