March 2, 2010

Recap |  Final Stats |  Notes

Cleveland State Head Coach Gary Waters:
"I thought we played a tremendous first half on both offense and defense. We gave up a little during the second half but we came back and closed the game in the end. When we do what we do best that is when we can win a game and that is what happened tonight, but we have to focus on playing a full 40 minutes."

"They are big inside and physical inside so we had to match that tonight. They scored more than they should have, which was caused somewhat by them getting too many offensive rebounds. We need to go back to the drawing board and work on this for the next game."

"With Jeremy hitting his three late in the game, it opened up the floor for us and let us have some freedom with where we put the ball."

"Having great play inside is great for us, it allows us to do much more against bigger teams and allows us to be physical against big teams."

"Tonight's game was a very good effort from this team. The first half was quality at both ends of the court. Our objective going into the game was cutting down their top two scorers and we did that, thanks for the most part to Norris and D'Aundray."

Cleveland State's Norris Cole:
"We have to make teams adjust to us and not have to adjust to other teams. We have to make people play our game and that is when we are successful."

"We have a goal and we know what it takes to get that goal and we have to focus on the shots that we take and practice the shots that we are good at. We have been playing all season to get to the tournament and this is it."

"With the 20 assists that we had tonight it shows that we are sharing the ball on the court and getting it to the open man which will help us down the line."

"When they started to come back we knew that we had to go back to what we did during the first half. That was defending the middle, keeping the ball out of the paint and getting the ball down the court."

Cleveland State's Joe Latas:
"I was ready to come off the bench tonight, my role is to come in when Aaron can't be on the court and fill in and give the team a defensive pressence and I think tonight I was able to give them that."

Cleveland State's Aaron Pogue:
"We have been practicing our free throws for a long time and sometimes I'm not consistent but I just had to keep my faith and focus tonight."

Loyola Head Coach Jim Whitesell:
"They really jumped us in the first half, we were on our heels and they just took advantage of that. We made it interesting in the second half keeping the momentum our way getting five or 10 points in a hurry."

"We were getting out hustled the entire first half and we had to fight to get back in the game. In the beginning of the second half we did a good job of fighting back but we just didn't have quite enough."

"We knew we were going to try to go inside against them and we knew that they were going to try to beat us on the outside and that worked for them."

"Norris is deserving of being a first team pick he can make so many plays for the team and he knows the game of basketball."

"We had trouble guarding Norris one-on-one tonight and that allowed him to be able to score and pass the ball without having someone in his face and that hurt us tonight."