Greg Nossaman Quotations

When we were down nine on Thursday night, we knew Brandon would be able to play Saturday, so we said, let's try to (win this) so he can play another game. That was motivational.

What a great high school basketball game. You've got over 3,000 people here, you have the two Northwest District Players of the Year, what more could you ask for?

I coached Scott's brother in college. He's done a great job up there in his first year.

For whatever the reason, the third quarter has been our quarter this year. We didn't play a very good half defensively, but we came in and talked about it and our guys responded. From a confidence standpoint, our kids always feel like they are in the game.

We made some adjustments the second half and went man-to-man and not much zone.

I thought our guys left it out on the floor. I'm very proud of the way they played. A bucket here or a bucket there and we're still playing.

I think these seven seniors are on a mission. I know our kids will be ready to go.

Jimmy is more of a scoring point guard. For us to be successful this season, he had to score a lot. He also added 4.5 assists per game. He is a very good athlete and could have played any sport, but we were fortunate enough to have him choose basketball. I believe he will be successful at Robert Morris.

That was good stuff. It was a great crowd and that's what high school basketball is all about.

That will give us another tough presence. We're a little deeper with him.

We've had him on a stationary bike and he's been shooting around, but he hasn't been practicing with us.

We don't have guys go to college to play ball. We have good athletes who buy into what we're doing and play hard. You have a couple good players and a bunch of guys that accept their roles, you can have a pretty good team every year.

We worked all week focusing on half-court defense and rebounding because you're going to have nights where you don't shoot well. It was a great week of practice. We sat down and played defense.

When you look at Mansfield Senior, they're deeper than we are. The difference is we are a little bigger. They sub speed for speed.

There have been a lot of great coaches and players come through the program and I'm proud to have been a part of the 1,000th win. To be one of the 30 or 40 programs in the state to have 1,000 wins is a great honor.

We've had some good players, but we've had a lot of good role players to go along with them.

This team has some pretty good chemistry. They've faced some adversity and they keep plugging along.

We got a little careless there at the end. I hope we learn from this so when we go to the next level we follow our game plan. I thought our kids did a nice job of making adjustments and rebounding. That's a good team we played. We're playing some pretty good basketball right now. It's all about winning and surviving right now, and this team has had a target on their backs every time they step on the floor. When you score 101 points in a district final -- that's pretty good.

We had a foul to give and we were trying to knock the ball away and get under two seconds to make them take a wild shot. I thought if the lob to Reed wasn't there, their guard would step out on a backside screen and catch it and shoot it. Hopefully, we can learn from that when the situation arises again. But guys stepped it up when we needed to, and I'm very proud of them.

We were playing for No. 30 tonight. That was our motivation. He's a three-year starter and he's been denied half his senior year.

Everybody in town is talking about it, No. 1 and No. 2. But I told the kids at practice on Monday we're not talking about it, and we're not going to talk about it until Thursday at 9 p.m. If we're fortunate enough to win this game, then we can talk about it as soon as they want.

A few fouls, a few injuries, we played a lot of kids. We played 14 kids and 12 of them scored.

Once we got the lead we put the ball in the hands of one of the better guards in Ohio. Even though he was double-teamed all night, he got 38 points and got the others involved. It might not sound like it when he has 38 of our 62, but he hit the other guys at the right time.

They're probably on the locker room floor right now because they're spent.

It's a 32-minute game. The kids are starting to realize its been nip and tuck for us in the first half of a lot of our games lately. Then Jimmy caught fire and scored almost half of our points.

It says a lot about the level of basketball being played in the area. Mansfield Senior is in the top 10 in the state in wins. There is some very good basketball played in this part of the state.

It's a historic rivalry. When you look at the history of the league, Willard has 24 (boys basketball) championships and Bellevue has 17 and everyone else is in single-digits.

I'm very proud of my team, we're 23-0.

If you go by rankings, I guess we're the underdog but our guys are playing with a lot of confidence. We respect all of our opponents, but we don't fear anybody. Our kids aren't going to be intimidated.

I know Jon had 38 points and they had 73 points, but I thought we played great defense. It was a great team effort.

In a 32-minute high school game, I'll usually give them 28 minutes. That's the middle of the fourth quarter. If the other coach waives the white flag and pulls his starters at the beginning of the third quarter, I'll do the same.

He's among the best ever to put on a Willard uniform. He's a steal.