March 19, 2009
SAN DIEGO -
San Diego State Head Coach Steve Fisher
On wishing Coach Burns and the Aztecs great success in the NCAA tournament:
"I'll start with wishing Beth Burns and her Aztecs great success. They are involved in the NCAA tournament here in Cox Arena. I know that they will play hard and hopefully they will get themselves two victories to move on. We wish them great success and congratulate them on what they've done."
On preparing for Friday's game against Kansas State:
"We are preparing for game two in a five game set over at Jenny Craig (Pavilion) that we are going to call our home for a night. We're excited about hosting. We will have a team in Kansas State that will be formidable. We're glad we've got them here. This is a team, in watching them over the last 24 hours, they guard hard. If you want to know what they are like, they're a little bit like (UNLV) in how they guard; very aggressive pressure defense; extremely physical. They are the best offensive rebounding team that we will have played all season. That pretty much describes the job description; keep them off the glass, take care of the ball, get a good shot every time down. I'm glad that we have five seniors, led by Richie Williams as a point guard who's been there done that against heavy pressure. I'm confident that we will handle their pressure, do a good job. We need our fans. We are appreciative of the fans that we had in Cox Arena against Weber State; they were good and they were loud. We're going to need to pack that building over there to make it a huge home court advantage for San Diego State.
"There's a fine line between being quick and being out of control. We need to be quick and under complete control when they run to double team us and do things that they do full court defensively. Richie is going to be the catalyst for that."
On the toughest thing about the quick turnaround between NIT games:
"What we did going in is we had one coach on Kansas State, even before we played Weber State, one coach on Illinois State and then I watched the tape on each. We all settled in at 7 o'clock last night when we knew it was going to be Kansas State and started preparing hard. They run a lot of stuff so it's going to be impossible to go through walk-through for two days, three days, and (know) all their sets. We've not played them before so it's not like we've got a familiarity with them or the same coach over two or three years. To some degree, we're going to have to be basketball players."
San Diego State Senior Guard Richie Williams
On whether or not it is an advantage for SDSU to have already played teams that guard similarly to Kansas State:
"I think so, just because we won't be rattled. The number one thing that we have to do with teams that play aggressive defense like they do would be to take care of the ball. We can't let a team get easy baskets off of turnovers. The next would be to rebound. We can't let them get second chance opportunities."
On playing at the Jenny Craig Pavilion:
"Even though we're away from Cox Arena, we're not out of San Diego. We still expect our fan base to be pretty high. We're going to need it to keep that home court advantage. We haven't been in Jenny Craig in over a year, so we're going to need to get familiar with it today."