Dave Newton Quotations

He's a good shooter. We'd like him to take more shots, but being a sophomore, I think he has it in himself that he doesn't think he needs to take those shots. But we need to have him take those looks and try to knock those down.

He's a bigger kid who can shoot inside and out and he was doing both (Tuesday) night.

He was our 'go-to-guy' and our offense ran through him as well. Jeremy did a great job this year. It was a big adjustment for him compared to the previous year because he had to show some leadership out on the floor with the youth we had. I expected a lot out of him and I think I got what I needed out of Jeremy this year. I thought that he stepped up and did what we asked of him and made himself a presence out there on the floor and us as a coaching staff appreciated that.

He's getting his confidence and he's figuring out that the varsity level is a little higher intensity level. But he's adjusting and so are the other kids. I'm pleased with all those guys that swing. I can't say enough good things about what I think that is doing for our basketball program in the future.

Pleasant Hill just has too many horses, they're a good basketball team.

I will be out and about watching games and players.

I thought Jeremy had a steady game. For having 16 points, it didn't really seem like he had that many. He just did so many other things. He had nine rebounds and that's key.

I thought Jeremy played pretty steady for us. He played a lot of minutes and he just had a great game on the boards and he tried to do what he could defensively.

Kenneth didn't have a lot of numbers offensively, but his presence on the boards was felt out there and I think defensively he made some contributions as well. So did Will before he fouled out. He was playing some pretty good defense and scrambling around out there, causing some havoc.

I thought we played four solid quarters of basketball. We started out with a great first quarter. I thought we handled their half-court trap very well. Kenneth (Bradley) got loose for some big points down low. He scores nine of his 16 in the game right there. I thought we did a better job of looking up the floor and being patient about moving the ball from point to the wing and hitting the middle.

I thought the kids gave themselves every chance to pull out a win in their first league game. We are playing better basketball, and that's encouraging, but our problem in the first half is that we had 19 turnovers. We ended up with only seven in the second half.

We just didn't get the shots up that we needed to get up and you just cannot do that at the varsity level. You're just not going to get away with that. We have to do a better job taking care of the basketball and then on the offensive side, executing and getting some movement in the offense and giving it a chance to get into a flow.

We just didn't have a good first half. Our problem has been inconsistency to put four quarters together all season long, and that's been our downfall.

(Y-C) just got too many looks at the basket - right at the hoop. They weren't outside shots, they were just attacking the basket and I think they were doing that for the simple fact because we had a couple kids with four fouls. Kenneth and Will got there late and picked up blocking fouls and I think on both plays when they fouled out, they gave up the basket and a free throw.

When both those kids went to the bench, even though they weren't giving us a lot from the offensive scoring department, they were giving us a lot from a continuity standpoint. They were allowing us to have flow and move the ball well and get it to our shooters and they helped with rebounding.

We got to where we made some better decisions as far as passes were concerned. We didn't hold the ball as much and telegraph passes. I though we had better reversal. We got out on the break a little bit better where we were able to get some better looks at the basket and not get into so many half-court sets. We do want these kids to get out and use some of their athleticism and play in the open court a little bit and I thought we did a much better job of that in the second half.

There are some big smiles on our kids after that game.

Defensively, we held them to eight, Holman had six inside and he ends up with eight for the game - so we hold him to two points the rest of the way. That's a pretty good effort against the big guy.

We didn't get off to too good of a start in the first quarter falling behind as bad as we were playing offensively. We were able to hang onto it because Y-C was making some early turnovers and giving us every opportunity to stay in the game.

This gives Leeds something unique, something special. And it could grow to become something really big and long-lasting.

I know they're not satisfied or happy with losses - they better not be - but they're trying hard, so that's all I can ask.

Their effort - they scramble and work as hard as they can until the end of the game. And I coach them to the end in that situation - I don't care what the score is. I want to see them get better and see those young kids have some success down the line here in the next couple years and it's going to start against good teams like that.

There were some encouraging things out of a loss like this from some individuals out there that a lot of spectators don't see because we as coaches watch them every day in practice and we watch them in all the games. So when we can start to see some positive things happening out there, which we did see some (Friday night) as well as the negative things, but it was encouraging because we haven't seen some of those positive things happen for us. Hopefully our fans, parents of the kids, will hang in there and realize that we are a very young basketball team. They've got a lot of heart. They try hard. They don't ever give up. They don't quit. There's no quit in this team. Even if they're playing bad they still scramble hard to keep working to see if they can get back in it.