Craig Haase Good Quotations

Obviously Charlie is a very good player, and our seniors have really accepted him. When he came back, he did give us an added scoring punch, but what gives us defensive pressure-wise makes our kids a little more confident. Our kids have accepted him and it's a tribute to our seniors that haven't let his distractions become the team's distractions. They've done a nice job implementing him back in the lineup.

Playing on a big stage like this, at the Kohl Center, at the state tournament, I don't know if you ever expect to come out and shoot the ball like we did tonight. I had a feeling, though, we might have a good game. At the shoot-around on Wednesday, we made every­thing we threw up there. The way we're playing right now, nothing surprises me with this group of kids.

John Hoch really took control for us today. He's one of our senior leaders and he might have had his best overall game. He did a lot of good things. He not only scored but ran our offense and made some key steals. When he plays like that, our chances of winning improve a lot.

That's a very, very good basketball team we lost to tonight. We struggled at times, but our guys played hard. It wasn't our effort that hurt us. Central just had too many weapons. Every time we made a run at them, they had an answer.

What we have to do is take care of the ball and value each possession. It's probably going to be a defensive game. They play good defense and so do we. At this time of the year, the team that makes the fewest mistakes usually wins.

We've had a good run the last five years and that's a credit to the kids and the coaching staff. We always seem to play our best basketball of the year once the tournament begins. And we're going to have to play well on Friday to stay with South. They've got a great team this year.

The nice thing today was we had a lot of kids play well and we played very unselfish basketball. That's how we have to play to be successful. We don't have a bunch of superstars. We've just got a bunch of guys who can be pretty good at this game when they play together. I think we proved that today.

Those two runs we made were huge when you look at the final score. We knew how big they were inside we so we had try and turn the game into a track meet. That worked pretty good for us tonight.