Kelvin Sampson Kids Quotations

He was in a group that could have made it or not made it. But I said there's no way we're going out of this country playing on a team without P.J. Tucker. That's one of the things the USA teams have missed in the past. We've taken cookie-cutter kids instead of kids with big hearts who know how to win.

Jimmy is great. To me, he's great with the kids and he's excellent for your program.

I think I talked to a group of kids that desperately want a coach and need a coach right now. I need them right now because I left behind an incredible group of kids (at Oklahoma), and I think they need me, too.

We're playing good enough to win, and that's a great attribute to have. Our kids know how to win games.

Duke is the premier basketball program in the nation. For us, this is a great opportunity, and to me, it is an honor to go to Duke and play. Playing Duke will be a great experience for our kids and will certainly prepare us for the wars we are going to have to play in the Big Ten.

In order to say you got lucky, well you've got to be good enough to get lucky first of all. We won the game, so give Oklahoma some credit. They could have won it, but we won it. That's why you give our kids a lot of credit.

I'm going to be really patient, and I want to help them. But I want them to make a decision that is best for them. And I just want to facilitate it. It's not a hard sell. It's these kids' lives. And that's more important than anything else we're dealing with. The most important entity here is these kids and their decision, and I'm dealing with it on both sides.

These kids will bounce back. It's not like we're 8-20. We're 20-8.

This team desperately needs leadership. Coaches can fuel practice, but come game time, you've got to have kids that are more vocal, with more fire.