TAMPA - University of South Florida men's basketball head coach Stan Heath sat down with the media on Monday and talked about several differnt topics, including what happened in the St. John's game, how the team has been preparing for Villanova, the overall health of the team and much more.
Click here or on the picture above to hear what Coach Heath had to say.
Coach Stan Heath
Opening Statement...
"We would like to put the last one behind us. It wasn't a good performance, and I didn't think our intensity level was there at all. I don't think we worked as a team as well as we needed to, but welcome to the BIG EAST. We are not the only team that has probably had those same ups and downs during the year, and there is still a log jam of teams right where we are so this is a pivotal game. Villanova is coming off of two losses so they are not going to be a happy bunch of guys, and we just laid an egg so were not very happy either. We get to play on their on-campus facility which is a little bit different because it seats about five or six thousand people and they are all right on top of you. We will have to block that out and we will have to bring a much better defensive effort and a much better offensive performance and really get back to where we were a few weeks ago."
On whether it's harder to prepare for Villanova because they haven't played them all year...
"That is our league. We play three teams twice and the majority of the teams we just play once. I don't think it is a plus or a minus. They are in the same boat as us, but they are awfully good. They know who they are, they know what they do and they have great leadership and experience out of Scottie Reynolds and Corey Fisher. It is a very defensive minded team that is aggressive and takes you out of what you want to do. Offensively, they know what they can and can't do and they do things very well out there."
On whether he has been able to put his finger on why things developed the way they did against St. John's...
"St. Johns has some good players. I am sure if you said pick a starting lineup out of the ten guys out on the floor I am not sure they wouldn't win that battle with us every day. I think what has happened is for the most part we have been a better team. On that day you saw the opposite. We were a little more individualistic and you saw them come together as a team. That is a talented group. Justin Burrell is a monster, but that is just our league. You look at UConn and you say USF should be able to beat UConn but that team is ridiculously loaded with talent so we can't kid ourselves and say USF is here and this other team is here. We are all in the same boat and it is about who comes to play that game offensively and defensively and functions as a team. The team that does that is the team that wins."
On the health of the team relative to Saturday...
"I'm hoping we're better. Behind the scenes, Jarrid I think was favoring that knee. The reason why Alex didn't play much, he had a hip flexor problem that hampered him in practice. He really didn't practice much the last couple of days before that game. Gus, it's hard to get a feel of where exactly he is. I know he's able to go out there on the court, but he's not the same guy he was back in December. When he becomes that, I don't know. It's two things, it's health and rhythm. I think he's got to get in sync, and in sync means he's got to kind of blend in with what's going on with our team, instead of us kind of stopping and reverting back to where we were before. If it comes back that way, great, but right now we're not there."
On if he's concentrating on just the perimeter game with Villanova...
"They force you to make some plays. The key is, and I thought Pittsburgh did a phenomenal job, is having some ball movement and player movement before you attack. You're going to see trapping ball screens. You're going to see switching on defense. You're going to see a lot of things a lot of teams aren't usually playing, simply because they have, I think, forward positions, the 3, 4 and 5, that are so interchangeable and so moveable that they can do things that are a little bit unconventional that you see. It's a difficult team in a lot of ways. I look back on our film from last year, we played them wire to wire. It's the last three, four minutes of the game, and we missed a layup, missed two 1-and-1's. I think we missed an open shot. It's still a game that within the last three minutes we had a legitimate chance to pull off, we just didn't get through. I don't look at them as way up here and we're way down here. They're a good, good team, but it's a team that we're going to prepare as hard as we can to try to steal a win. Hopefully we liken it to maybe a Georgetown situation, where we go into there as the underdog but we just come together, we grind it out, and we find a way to win."
On if the win over Georgetown helps the team with confidence going on the road again...
"I think the Georgetown win helps us when we go on the road, Providence and Georgetown. It gives us a sense of, we're going into a hostile environment, we're playing against a really good team, in Georgetown's case a ranked team, and we found a way to get the job done. It does give us something to fall back on, but we've got to play for 40 minutes. We've had some slow starts. The Notre Dame game on the road, we were down 16-2. Marquette, I thought we let things get away at the end of the first half, and I thought the same thing happened last game. As poorly as we played, I think in the last two minutes, it was still like a two or three-point game against St. John's, and they got away from us at the end of the first half. We can't have those bad four, five-minute segments, especially on the road and especially against a team like Villanova."
On if he's talked to the team about the postseason or just about the next game, then the next game...
"I'm going to talk to my team in about five minutes here. After the game I didn't want to see them; they probably didn't want to see me either. We just needed to get away from each other for a minute. It just wasn't the way we wanted things to go. I'll see them in a little while. We're going to talk about a lot of things. More than postseason things, we're going to talk about ourselves and what we need to be doing to get ourselves back on track. That's got to be our focus, fixing us."
