Head Coach Dave Bezold

On the start of the season…
“Our common theme this year, and I told them after the game in the locker room again, and they are probably going to get tired of me saying this, every night it is going to be something, somebody different as far as the way we are going to have to win basketball games. And, tonight it was Pat Cary and Kevin Reinhardt, and the other night it happened to be Harrison Morton. It was very important to the ball club to have a cushion at the back end of the game because that’s a good basketball team we just played.”

On areas of improvement for coming games…
“We are looking for consistency. And what happens is when we get a little tired our offense and consistency goes, and we have a lull where we will go into a drought for a couple of minutes where we are not getting good shots because we do get tired, and we are not making the cuts we need to make and the defensive reads we need to make. On defense we get a little careless, which is what happened tonight. That’s why we kept them into the game. We stop doing the fundamental things on defense, like having our hands in the passing lanes, a couple block out assignments and being aware of where the ball was.”

On Mike Kelsey’s second half performance…
“His game has matured so much, and at halftime I think he had like two points and two shots or whatever. But again, he is so well conditioned that they are not going to wear him out. He will just continue to work, and eventually those shots are going to come, and he hit some really big shots for us when they were making their run at us. You can’t say enough about him.”

Sean Rowland

On the importance of winning the first two games…
“They are GLIAC teams, so they are in our region. And, we know we have to go up to their places over Christmas break, so we needed to win both games. Plus, we expect to win every time we go out there, and anything less would be a disappointment.”

On what the team learned the first few games…
“We need to work on both our defense and our offense. It’s early in the year and you can tell because defensively we are making way too many mistakes. We held them to 62 points, but it should have been 50. I mean, we were making way too many mistakes defensively and offensively. We just need to be patient and find the open man.”

On how defenses are keying in on Mike Kelsey…
“Walt is such a good player that he’s going to get open and score points, so if the shot’s not there, he’s going to cut backdoor to do it. A smart basketball player would do it, and we have enough good players around him to get him the ball.”

Pat Cary

On how much the team wanted to win against the other regional teams…
“We wanted to win them bad. Bez’s first two games at home, our first two games period, we wanted to get them bad. We came out last night real excited. We came out last night real pumped up for Michigan Tech because we knew they were sixth in the nation, and we wanted to knock them off. And, tonight we just wanted to get the win, and we knew we were the better team. We came out and knew we could win, we just had to get it done.”

On his performance…
“I could have got more rebounds. I only had four rebounds, so I could have gotten more rebounds. I could have played a lot better. I didn’t play really well on defense. I didn’t play better on defense yesterday, so I could have played better. I just didn’t miss a shot, but I could have played a lot better.”

On what the team needs to work on…
“We need to get more intensity to start the game. Yesterday we came out hyped, but there was a big crowd out there. I mean, the student section was crazy, we need more students out there. We need to somehow recruit more students to come to the game. I don’t know how we are going to do that, but we need people out there like there were yesterday because they were standing and going crazy the whole time. We need to come out with more intensity, especially on the road.”