Gordie Kerkman Quotations

He does so many things. We put stickers on the players' lockers, and we're running out of room on his.

He does a lot of things. Gets his hands on a lot of balls, hits the boards, defense. He has a lot of talent. He can shoot the ball. He can make a lot of things happen.

I almost called a timeout, but I figured I'd see if we could play through it, and we did. I thought our kids maintained their intensity in that situation and did well not to panic.

He could impact a game in so many ways that he didn't always need to score. We don't often have a prolific scorer in our system. I was even able to hold Kenny Battle down to 18 points a game.

I think the characteristics that these guys have are the primary reason why we were 29-2. They're a fun team to coach. A bunch of nice young men. From a standpoint of whether we could get to Peoria or not, we just kind of took that one game at a time this year.

I thought we made a lot of bad decisions but, I guess when people put that type of pressure on you, you tend to make bad decisions. I thought we were very listless the first half.

I think we're playing pretty well. I will always say that we could play better, but I don't think we're playing poorly. I would like to see us smooth out our game a little more.

John was an idol of mine. He was so close to winning a state title. He is very highly respected. He is truly one of the greatest in the state.

That's the worst job we've done all year. (But) Batavia anticipates very well and they do a good job of getting their hands in the passing lanes. We also made some very poor decisions.

The only thing difficult about a big arena is the background. You really have to focus on the rim so you don't pick up all that background.

We gave (Rocha) and maybe a couple of other guys some pretty good looks in the first half, and something we really want to tighten up is our intensity, to play all four quarters.

We cannot look back on that game other than to say we know a few things about certain players. We're a different team from then, too. I think we're a little better than we were.

We just had to play basketball. That's one of the things we addressed, don't let the emotions of this particular situation get you down. We had to come back and play the way we're capable of playing.

We were playing like we were down big, and we really weren't. I thought we were going for steals too quick. It was causing us to foul. It was causing us to give up easy baskets. Pretty soon we had to shoot threes and we had to foul. They hit free throws and we didn't hit threes. You're in bad shape then.

East Aurora is struggling right now but if we have to play them next Friday, I'll guarantee you they'll be playing a lot better than they have the last month or so. It's going to be tough for us.

I sort of thought that we got out of our game plan today. You could even see it in the first half. I wasn't very pleased with the way we were playing. I thought we were hurrying our offense a little bit. That's not necessarily our style.

Teams have had us in their sights for quite a while. We're used to that. And I think it's good for us to know we always have to be on top of our game.

Once we got the conference to a point where we wrapped it up, that's when we started thinking about the state tournament series. Whether these guys could make it or not? We're not an overpowering team, but we will battle you. I thought we could play with anybody, but we didn't really blow too many people out.

A lot of people don't realize what a leader he is. He is more than deserving to be on the list. He's been a big part of our success in several capacities.

They kind of surprised us with their outside shooting.

It's an honor considering the guys that didn't make it. I feel fortunate that I've been surrounded by people that have given us success. Not to be too modest, but I feel better for both of them.

It's going to be a problem for us because we don't have any big men to match up with him.

It's a very good conference. When we came into it, people said we'd walk right through and we haven't. Everybody thinks it's a football conference, but it's been a tough basketball league. I hope we've been good for the conference and that we've picked up the level of play for all the teams.

That's one of the things in the second half of the season that I would really compliment our kids on is they finish games really well. Tonight, we didn't. We had to hang on.

They learned to shoot the three better since the last time we played them. I didn't know if we could stop their threes, but we hit our free throws.

I think our kids have been that way all year long.

This has been one of our better years in terms of taking care of the basketball.