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Jan. 3, 2004
PROVIDENCE COACH TIM WELSH
Our guys are a group that, at the end of last year, had learned to win on theroad. We’re a mature team, and we’ve played in a lot of tough places.
At halftime we had 15 turnovers and they were outrebounding us, and we wereup by five. We told the players at halftime that if we just cleaned up thebasketball things, we’d be alright.
We had assists on 23 of 32 baskets, and that’s tremendous.
Our zone was good. We were active, we moved well. We found Billet, and thatwas key. He can hurt you. That’s our staple. If teams hurt us, we have to makeadjustments. They threw a lot of different schemes at us, and for the mostpart we reacted well.
The key was getting through their first wave of pressure. At the end of thefirst half, I thought we were going sideways a little. We have to attack.
VIRGINIA COACH Pete Gillen
I thought the big key to the game was Providence’s Marcus Douthit–he onlyscored four points, but he had six blocks and intimidated a lot of other shots.Providence is a very good team and they played very well. We worked hard andforced them to have 24 turnovers, but we had too many turnovers ourself. Wegot timid against the zone.
We need to do a better job defensively. We put a lot of effort into it, butProvidence played very well. In this game steals made the difference and thoseturnovers led Providence to easy layups. We did some good things on defense,but steals and deflections led to easy layups.
It’s tough for us to win when Devin Smith has only eight points and DerrickByars scores two. Devin didn’t have his legs tonight, as he’s in and out ofpractice with his back. Derrick just didn’t have a good game today. If those guysonly score 10 points then we’re going to have a tough time winning.
We have to respond and get ready for the in-state game against William &Mary on Monday. Those games are always emotional. We have to respond and be readyto play.