Chattanooga Basketball Postgame Quotes
Chattanooga at ETSU
Freedom Hall Civic Center – Johnson City, Tenn.
Saturday – January 5, 2019

Lamont Paris, Head Coach
Opening statement after loss at ETSU.
"They had eight or so offensive rebounds, which is a little misleading when you look at their field goal percentage, but they're a tough, physical, and athletic team. You have to match that with aggression and if you don't, you'll get swallowed up. I thought we didn't do a good job of that today and they made some grown man type plays against us that we weren't ready for. You'll end up with an L on most days where that happens. They beat us down in many different ways. Especially around the basket. I don't think we could have changed the outcome because they just beat us down in a lot of areas. They stayed in attack mode."

On what led to 26-point loss.
"They're huge. You see them in the handshake line and it's amazing. They're a very strong and physical team. And what hurt us the most was that we didn't finish a lot of plays around the basket. A lot were near, but just almost. Those are critical points you leave off the board. Very reproducible plays that would yield easy points were left out there. Those last couple minutes of the first half, we just didn't play basketball and we let them on a run. That kind of stuff happened a lot in this game and that's a big part in why it ended up how it did, 26 point difference."
 
On learning to fight back from large deficits.
"Some of it is our play, some is not our play and it's our mode of thinking. A 17 point deficit is set up for a great comeback against a team that plays in a style that can allow it. We have to be able to want to comeback. They have to learn that and they will when they do it a couple times. It's the most frustrating thing. I always tell our guys there's going to be someone better, bigger, faster, stronger. But there should be nobody out there that will outwork you. We have to be more locked in to what our rules are and what we practice." 
 
Ramon Vila, So.-F
Coming off a tough performance, how do you pivot to get ready for Samford next week.
"We have an entire week of practice. We'll go through our mistakes today, take care of those and get better as a team."
 
After six games out of seven on the road, how does it feel to have three in a row at home.
"I like that. I literally started playing last month and have only had the chance to play at home once. We're excited to get back in front of our fans. This stretch coming up is important. We're not satisfied being 2-2. We've lost to two of the best teams in the league so we know where we have to improve. We played a lot of close games last year, and I think we'll have those same types of games so we have to be prepared."

Donovann Toatley, Fr.-G
On defensive efforts.
"Seeing 96 points is definitely disappointing. As a collective unit, we have to pick the intensity up on the defensive end and that starts with myself. We just have to hone in one defense and take pride in it. We're more than capable of a team to hold other teams to 60-50 points because of our athleticism and basketball IQ. We just have to want to do it on a consistent basis and once we do that, we'll be fine."

On splitting the two-game road trip.
"The road trip wasn't a total success, obviously, after today's loss. We got a lot of confidence in our first game and we learned a lot in showing resiliency being down in both games. We learned a lot from each game and we're going to bounce back from this."