Quotes by Craig Pippen

“Our coaching staff challenged the team after the loss (Thursday to Newport Central Catholic), and we had a couple of seniors step up and hold a team meeting before the game. I think they are ready to change their ways. They kind of made a statement that enough was enough when it comes to hard work and getting it done.”

“Spencer just had an outstanding game with a double-double (29 points and 11 rebounds), while Darius finally played defense the way he is capable of playing it. He will continue to be challenged to do that. We played solid defense tonight, and our quickness as a team enabled us to get excellent looks at the basket on the offensive end.”

“(Holy Cross) showed a lot of poise to get back in the game. We went back to our old ways of trying to playing too fast. We were able to hold them off, though, and made a late run to pull away.”

“We will focus on the positives we had tonight and continue to get after it in practice. If the effort is there, the sky is the limit for this team. Ive been preaching that from day one. I think they realize now that hard work - in practice and in games - wins basketball games.”

“We didnt execute they way we had been preparing to. Basketball is about effort and execution. The effort was there at times, the execution wasnt. I just felt like we were playing not to lose instead of playing to win. We didnt stick to our game plan. We didnt play like we practiced the last week.”

“It definitely did. Our guards tried to force some passes that werent there. Our guard play has got to improve because we didnt play with much poise when we needed to.”

“We need to regroup. Its going to be interesting to see what type of character we have on this team, how were going to bounce back next week.”

“Our players have stayed positive even though we havent come up with some wins. Theres been some negativity surrounding our program, and the kids havent listened to it.”

“Our plan was to push him away from the basket and make him use a dribble if he was going to make it to the basket and we didnt want the ball to come to him and have him be able to fan it out to the guards.”

“Any time you see a balanced scoring column like that, thats a mark of a good team.”