courtesy of Jack Alden

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"Particularly the last 14 minutes of the first half, I thought we were really good. Our execution was better, we moved the ball much better on the perimeter, when we could get it inside we got it inside, when we didn't like it we passed it back out... We were just a lot sharper during that time period. We made a bunch of shots because of it, and we were able to get some things going defensively. I really enjoyed watching us play during that time. It was a lot of fun. I know we're more gifted than Fort Hays, but I did think that we were playing closer to our potential during that last 14 minutes than at any other time. "The second half was pretty ugly, and it's hard to go with that kind of lead and keep that same kind of intensity, so I told the kids I was disappointed about that. But at the same time, our goal tonight was to get better, and I think we did get better. "I like three offensive rebounds. Keith (Langford) does have a knack for getting to the offensive boards, and that's an area where we're greatly concerned about. He got in for three offensive rebounds for baskets, made a couple of threes... He's a gifted young man. I think Aaron (Miles), Keith, and Wayne (Simien), all three are really going to play a heck of a lot of basketball. Maybe one of them will play one night and act like a freshman the next night, but I didn't get too excited about Wayne last week, and I'm not going to get too down on him this week. I know he's three for seven, and we had a lot of opportunities to get him the ball, and he fumbled some of them, but I thought he did some nice things. He remembered where he was supposed to go. He's so excited and wants to do well so badly that a lot of times you have to step back a little; you have to gear it down a little bit, and that's what you hope to get out of the two exhibition games, to be honest with you. "If you look at the totals, they have 22 offensive rebounds and we have 12, which is normally really bad, except for the fact we shoot 63% and they shoot 24%, so they're gonna have a heck of a lot more opportunities to get offensive rebounds. But the total rebound numbers of them outrebounding us 37-34, that's not something we're pleased with at all. No one, particularly the guys there at the end of the game, did a good job of boxing out, but we didn't do a good job throughout the course of the game. "We tried to do a little more scrambling (pressure defense), work on that a little more because we are going to try to play at a little faster tempo. We went with three big guys and tried to play a little zone right there at the end of the first half. We've got to do a better job of staying in front of the dribble and stopping the dribble penetration. If we do that, then our defense can be good. "I thought we were really active (defensively) in the first half. They made two threes really early in the game, and they made another three the last second of the first half. So that's nine of their 20 points in about a minute there, and the rest of the first half we held them to 11 points, had a lot of turnovers, and one shot they made we partially blocked it. So again, that last 14 minutes of the first half I thought we were good, but we've got to build on that and not sit back and get fat and happy. "(Ball State, 1st round opponent in Maui Classic) is a good basketball team. They have four starters back. During the course of the summer, we kept waiting for the pairings to come out, and I told one of my coaches, 'I really don't want to play Ball State." The reason is because I think they're very good, and sometimes your team doesn't appreciate that enough and they try to look down the line. We can't afford to do that. We've already started talking about that. We talked tonight, the magic number is four. We have four more good days of practice before we have to tip it off on Monday."

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