Andy Landers Team Quotations

We?re just excited to still be standing. We very much look forward to playing a very good Connecticut basketball team in the next round and have some sense of understanding about what?s involved in that task and what a challenge it?s going to be.

It isn't anything we haven't been exposed to before, but it will be a challenge. We'll just have to block it out. This basketball team has the ability to block it out and play.

We're a basketball team that understands it limitations. We understand that we don't have all the cards to play that many of the other teams have. At the same time, we're a basketball team that has some very good cards to play. Shuffling those cards and dealing them in the right manner - playing with each other and playing with each others' strengths - has in fact become our team's strength.

There are areas where I would like for us to be better or stronger. But we are a solid team with no glaring weaknesses.

This has been a very resilient basketball team and a very focused basketball team. This is a basketball team that has really flinched. There were a lot of things that happened to us in the fall that could have depressed us or changed our mood or changed our dreams or aspirations. But that really hasn't occurred. Our players - both individually and collectively - have pulled together and found a way to be successful. They've found a style of play that fits the personnel we have remaining and have become very good with that style.

Thirty minutes is not a big number, really. And I think another way to look at it is probably every team in America has got a kid or two that averages 30, 32, 34 minutes. If one kid can do it, there's nothing wrong with four kids doing it. Our kids have handled it very, very well.

The first thing you do is try to keep your team in condition. You can't afford with two weeks off to suffer from a conditioning aspect. The second thing is that you want to stay sharp in your execution and sharp mentally, particularly in the week leading up to the tournament.