Dec. 27, 2009

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Maryland Head Coach Gary Williams

Opening remarks:
"I think we had to play through some rust, while at the same time Winston Salem State was playing pretty good basketball. They have some quickness that caused problems early. It points out what you have to do defensively. I thought coming out in the second half we did a great job using the whole team, getting guys in there. Everyone that went in played hard. Gradually, you can wear a team like that down. I'm just pleased overall with what we did after not playing for a while. Hopefully this gets us started for the rest of the year."

On the play of the freshmen:
"Jordan Williams and James Padgett, they're working hard. They're works in progress; we're all working hard to see how we can get better."

On Greivis Vasquez:
"I think you saw tonight what he is capable of. It is there and it will happen. Hopefully he is on his way. I thought he played about like that in the second half of the Eastern Kentucky game, carrying into tonight. Hopefully it will be there the next game. That's very important because he is a leader and he helps everyone else when he is playing at that level. The two guys that are probably the quietest guys on the team, Sean Mosley and Landon Milbourne, they're always there. You know what you're going to get and it is great to see those guys play the way they play. You put those two and Eric Hayes in there and you don't get a lot of reaction out of them, but you know how hard they're working. They're really important parts of the team."

On Cliff Tucker's performance:
"In the first half, he got in the game and took his shots. In other words, he was on balance, he took really good shots, he drilled them and it was great to see."

"I think you can go off of last year with Cliff. He had some games last year where he was on the court against some good teams. I think he had 18 against North Carolina in the half. It is there, you just have to figure it out. I think tonight was a big step for Cliff, he got 17 minutes. He wasn't getting that many minutes. Off of tonight, you look at the next game and have to figure out a way to get him out [on the court]. It is a great thing that Cliff did for himself and the team."

On Maryland's jump shots:
"I thought we were a little quick and hapless in those games where you get a little jump shot. Jump shots are fine as long as you look inside first. You want to play inside out, most good teams play inside out. You get the ball in the paint, why not? We can score in there. We score a lot more points when we get the ball in the paint, whether we kick it out for the shot or score right from there, it just seems like we score more points once the ball gets inside."

On Maryland's three-point shooting:
"I think we made the looks we had. We made some early where I thought we shot it pretty quick. The threes in the second half were really good threes. In other words, we were probing the defense and the ball would come back out. We would swing it and there it was because [Winston Salem] had reacted to what we did by getting the ball inside, so that opens up the three on the guy if you can find him. We found them in the second half."

Senior forward Landon Milbourne

On today's game:
"Today was just about coming in here and not worrying about the holidays or having time off. We just wanted to come in here and play as hard as we could."

On improving his shot:
"I've put a lot of time in every day before and after practice and in the off-season. It was one of the things I wanted to fix about my game after my freshman year, and now I'm definitely getting my shot a lot."

Senior guard Greivis Vasquez

On his improvement recently:
"I've felt better. I don't know if there was a lot of pressure, but things weren't going smoothly with me, and I've got to get myself going as the leader of the team. In the last couple weeks, I've been feeling good, and I'm just going to continue to get better."

On the team's performance:
"We passed the ball pretty well today, and we've been looking for each other. I think overall it has been pretty good for us on offense. We just need to get better defensively."

On his play late in the game:
"I tried to take over and just run the point, run good offense, and find my teammates, and if there was a look for a layup, take it to the hoop and score."

Florida Atlantic Head Coach Mike Jarvis

On the game:
"You know it was hard to win on the road, definitely hard to beat a good team on the road and you have to do a much better job than we did of taking care of the ball and take advantage of opportunities. Like in the second half when we were down ten and we get in a dunking situation and we missed a layup, stuff like that. We turned the ball over too much."

On his team's greatest strengths:
"We did a good job on the offensive boards but we didn't finish many. At times when we were patient we got good stuff but we played like freshmen today, which we are. We're a very young team but this is why we play these games so we can hopefully learn and grow from them and get better"

On Maryland's strengths:
"They pretty much did what they wanted to do, and we didn't give them as good of a test as I would have liked, but they have better players right now, older players, wiser players, they execute when they really have to."

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