In His Defense

In all honesty, winning the state title just kind of went back and reiterated what we thought beforehand - that you have to be good, but there has to be some luck and some timing along the way. We've had some really good teams here in the first nine years that had the ball bounced the right way for them on the right night, then maybe we could have had another one or two [state titles]. But this year, had a couple of breaks not gone our way... The approach now isn't a lot different. Our goals every year remain pretty much the same. They are to go out and win a district championship, then win a regional championship, and to try to win a state championship. That has been out goal since year one, so not really much has changed from the end. We've realized for a few years now that we're always going to have a target on our back because of our rankings, but the target is going to be a little larger this year. From a coach's standpoint, our success every year is based on how close we come to getting our team to be able to play and execute at its capability, because every team is a little bit different. From a player's standpoint, I think they are just so focused on going out and hitting those three goals again this year that anything less than those three goals would be a disappointment for them. We have seven players coming back off last year's team, five of which were players that were in the rotation every game; two starters; one state tournament All-Tournament team player. So, the talent is there year in and year out, but I think right now the biggest thing is that they're playing with a lot of confidence. Throughout our spring and summer and fall leagues, throughout our workouts, they just have a lot of confidence in themselves and what we're trying to do here. I don't think you can replace a player of Willie Warren's ability with any one player. It's a team sport, and hopefully multiple players can come in and help make up what we lost with Willie. Another one, P.J. Colley is going to be extremely difficult to replace. He was 6'6" and long and athletic, and defended and rebounded. It's just a team, and the team has got to replace those seniors that graduated. It doesn't need to be any one person that steps up and says, "This year I'm going to be Willie Warren." Everybody has to understand their roles and buy into those rolls and we'll go from there. We have a lot of kids in this attendance zone that just love to play the game. There are a couple of sayings that we use all the time. One of them is that "tradition never graduates." Just because Willie Warren or P.J. Colley walked across the stage this year, Keith Langford walked across the stage in 2001, it doesn't mean that our goals or expectations go down. It's about a program. The other saying is that "success breeds success." We use it as one of our core beliefs of our program. We think that the success of past teams creates expectations and standards for future teams. Our basketball players expect to be successful year in and year out. I think now that a state championship has been won, the guys understand that it is not only a goal every year, but an attainable goal. I don't think a lot along the line of personal individual goals. I haven't set a bunch of individual goals as a basketball coach. I guess my goal is more of a year-to-year goal, and that's to get the most we can possibly get out of every team and have them play to our expectations. John Wooden always talked about how you measure success, and I really think you measure success not out on the scoreboard or in the record books, but you measure it based on how close you get to those individual teams performing to their potential.-