Jan. 2, 2005

Recap |  Box Score |  Notes

Head Coach Stan Joplin

"Anytime you're on the road you want to put yourselves in a position to win and we did that. But we had some slippage in our defense down the stretch and Eastern scored 20 points in their last 11 possessions. The areas we wanted to concentrate on were to keep them off the boards, keep them out of the middle and off the line and we didn't do that down the stretch."

"Eastern erased our eight point lead because of our transition defense. That's when we need to dig down and be a lot tougher. That's when the momentum changed. You have to give Eastern credit because they made the plays down the stretch and we didn't."

(on the defense in the first half)

"I think we did a decent job defensively in the first half but we couldn't sustain it. It hurt us when Allen hurt his ankle and Tino is coming off an ankle injury. We might have got a little bit tired but that's part of basketball and they have to play through that."

(on Eastern's defense of Keith Triplett)

"We had open shots but they didn't fall. They had two guys on him and he picked up a charge on one and we had shots but we couldn't knock them down. He made decent plays by kicking it out and but we just didn't make plays."

(on shooting shots too early)

"We talked about being more patient on offense and getting the same shot deeper into the shot clock. If we were more patient before we shot the ball we would have made them play more defense and that hurt us."

Sophomore guard Justin Ingram

(on what the team needs to do to recover from this loss)

"We just have to put this game behind us. It was a hard-fought game and one we thought we should have one. We just didn't make the plays down the stretch to win it. We just to keep our heads together and not let each other get down. We have to keep a good attitude and make sure we're ready for Thursday's game against Akron."

(on the team shooting shots too quickly)

"That's my job. I'm supposed to know the score and the situation and make good decisions. We didn't do that at the end and I have to take that as partly my fault."