Dec. 7, 2002

Recap| Box Score

Maryland Head Coach Gary Williams
On tonight's game:
"Basically in the game, offensively we did not shoot well enough to make up for our inability to run our half-court offense. In other words, sometimes when you're hot you can get away with it. However, we weren't shooting very well and missed some open shots early in the game. Defensively it takes a lot of effort to be a good defensive team, a lot of fire, emotion things like that. We just didn't have that today and Notre Dame did."

On his team's performance so far:
"We're in a situation where we're trying to see how we're going to play this year after losing four starters from last year. We're just trying to get the right mix of players who are going to go out there and play hard every game. Today we didn't do that. We don't have much time to get ready for tomorrow, but hopefully we'll come out with some more energy."

Gary Williams on the game's challenges:
"I think it was us. We just couldn't make a shot, we didn't have the patience to make the extra pass. I think without offense we could have had better results, because we weren't willing to work hard to run our offense. There is no magic. You have to work hard every year, you have to create a team each year."

Notre Dame Head Coach Mike Brey
On the atmosphere of the game:
"It's a great win for us. For this team in December, we're still trying to figure out our identity. One of the challenges we set for ourselves was 'could we do what we did Monday [at Marquette] night on the road?' We played very similarly Monday night, but now could we take it on the road in someone else's building technically, because we knew Maryland would have more fans and be poised. I thought that we did that for 40 minutes. It was a great team effort, and it's something to build on."

Coach Brey on his team's performance without a big game from Chris Thomas:
"We have such good perimeter players with experience out there. Dan [Miller] takes some pressure off if Chris Thomas isn't there, and Matt Carroll and Torin Jones gave us some fabulous minutes off the bench there as well I thought. We really know how to play on the perimeter, so we can share it if Chris isn't there."

Coach Brey on tonight's gameplan:
"We played a lot of zone tonight, a lot of match-up zone. It's a little bit of what we did Monday night against Marquette. We wanted to see some jump-shots go in before we made any adjustments. Most of the game we were rotating out of the match-up zone and we've gotten pretty good at playing that. Again if you look at how many games we've played, I think that's an advantage for us. Even though we have some new faces, to play eight basketball games, or to play seven before we came into this I think helped us in a lot of ways."