Nov. 22, 2008

Recap | Final Stats | Notes

South Carolina Head Coach Darrin Horn
Opening statement…
We are glad to get another win. Again, I thought our guys came out defensively with tremendous effort to start the game, which fueled our early lead. We saw good effort the whole game, which we were really pleased with. I think this is the best we’ve done for 40 minutes of basketball. We did a better job of trying to be unselfish and take better shots and I think that was a big key of the first half. We made a high percentage of our 3’s because we took better 3’s than we’ve been taking as a whole. We were good on the boards again, which is important for us especially offensively, to have 18, seven for Mike (Holmes), which is a great number. Between Devan (Downey) and Branden (Conrad) handling the basketball, we got 10 assists and two turnovers, which is another positive. All in all, I was really pleased with the effort, glad to get the win.

On the play of Mike Holmes…
I think anytime that happens, you can’t discredit the defense. That is a big kid (Nick Schneiders). Mike missed a few that he usually makes, but I think the more important thing to notice is that on a night when he’s 2-of-15, he still grabbed 12 boards, seven of them offensive, and contributes an assist, a block and a couple steals. That was really positive to see from Mike.

On the play of the defense…
I think the big thing was that while we only forced seven turnovers in the first half we were able to turn a lot of them into baskets. That’s one of the reasons we weren’t as good offensively in the second half, we didn’t get any easy baskets off of our defense forcing turnovers. We had a higher number where we forced them out of bounds or they dribbled it off their feet. The goal is to speed teams up and we were able to do that to some degree today.

South Carolina Player Quotes
Zam Fredrick- Sr.-Guard
On what was learned from the game…
We learned that we have to play good on defense all the time and give consistent effort. Because if shots aren’t falling we can’t let that dictate how we play on the defensive end because we always have to have strong defensive effort so we can have open looks and easy opportunities. If our shot is not falling in the half-court we still can maintain the lead.

On the team’s improvement…
I think we’re taking a step forward in every game. We’re focusing on rebounding and defensive effort. We had a lapse in the second half this game and it was because the effort was down. Once we switched the defense our effort went up and we were able to get the score back to where we wanted it. We’re just learning that it always takes consistent effort on the defensive end and we’ll always be where we need to be.

Devan Downey-Jr.-Guard
On improvement…
I think we definitely need to keep improving. We’re just three games into the season and we need to pick up on our defense, our shots, and continue to keep our effort up. The more we continue to play together the better off we’ll be.