University of Hawai'i at Manoa Athletics

 

I think we wore down a little bit. This is our fourth game in eight days and I don’t think that’s an excuse, I think it was more mental lapses. If you look at the stat line, you have 23 turnovers, you can’t, as a coach, feel pleased with that and I know they were pressing and trapping and getting us tired and running us down…but these guys are good players and they need to play through that. That was a very good test for us tonight against those guys and give Central Arkansas a lot of credit and I thought they played hard and I thought that was the first time this year that a team played harder than us.

 

You look at Joston (Thomas) who almost had a double-double and it was kind of by committee after that, Bill (Amis) had three, Vander (Joaquim) got four, and there’s a lot of guys with twos and threes and it was a rebounding by committee.

 

I kind of felt that going into the game that we needed to do that. I thought they would eventually get to our legs. We actually substituted early and often and in the second half we did it again and I was hoping that we’d have legs left to go but give Central Arkansas credit, they didn’t die, they kept coming after you, and we were hoping they would die and our legs would be a little fresher but they did a nice job and played, I thought, the best they could with their game plan.

 

There’s a lot of good things that happened tonight and if you look at the stat sheet, and as a coach, you get a little frustrated at the turnovers…but I’ll watch the film tonight and I’ll find a lot of good things tonight that I’ll remember and I’ll find some things that we’ve got to work on but that middle 20 minutes was pretty darn good basketball and the first 10…kind of got to us that it was the first time we got pressed and the last 10 I think we did get tired.