Jan. 4, 2003

Recap| Box Score| Notes| Photo Gallery

Maryland Head Coach Gary Williams
Opening statement:
"They are the type of team that plays like they are coached. Dereck Whittenburg played hard all the time and has a great background. His team certainly does a good job. I'm sure they will be one of the teams to beat in their league. And they deserve a lot of credit for the way they played today. It looked like it was going to be pretty easy [after the first five minutes]. We reacted to that probably in the wrong way, where we didn't execute quite as well as we could. I thought our defense was OK, but they scored quite a few points on fastbreak opportunities. It means the other team is outworking you, and we don't get outworked very often. We did some good things. That Wagner team lost to Connecticut in Storrs, and they are a very good scoring team. I think we held them to about 12 points under their average. There were some positive things out there today. Chris McCray had seven steals. He was really active out there. That's all you want -- guys to play like that. I don't think all of our players were as active as they could have been, especially on the glass."

On Jermaine Hall of Wagner:
"He's pretty good, he might be the player of the year in New York City. Seriously. He really hurt us today, he did a great job. He had 26 points and 11 rebounds -- that's pretty good.

On the Terp freshmen:
"Freshmen look to seniors, how the emotions are, how it's going. Your freshmen shouldn't have to be the people to get them jacked up. Everybody on the team has responsibilities. Nik Cander-Medley has played a lot of minutes and knows what it takes. Chris is getting in there some now. At some point you put it on yourself. You get past the point of being a freshman before your freshman season is over."

On the pieces falling into place:
"Well we better be together pretty well. We get pretty serious with Hampton coming in, and we go from there. We had our pieces together pretty well against Georgia Tech, and we won by 22 today against a team that has beat some people and played some people tough on tough courts. Their schedule reminds me of when I was at AU, where you go play for money. You don't win a lot of those games, but it makes you tougher when it comes to conference play."

On Hampton:
"The good thing for us is we know Hampton. They were in the regional in Boise [two years ago]. I'll never forget their game against Iowa State. I never saw a team take over an arena like Hampton did. Since we didn't have to play them it was pretty fun to watch. They know how to play basketball. They run good sets, they don't take bad shots. They are a dangerous team. Hampton is used to winning."