Dec. 28, 2009

Recap | Box Score

Post-Game Quotes
Loyola vs. St. Francis (Ill.)
December 28, 2009

Loyola Head Coach Jim Whitesell
Thoughts on the game
"Give St. Francis credit, we got off to a 7-2 start and they just really kind of bothered us. I guess we thought, `OK, we're going to get going,' but turnovers hurt us. They really disrupted us. We need to get better at that and we didn't handle their press very well. Give St. Francis a lot of credit, I think those kids came to play."

On what has helped Loyola get off to a 10-2 start
"I think the thing is, as I keep telling this group here, that the value of our group is the group. There is not a go-to scorer necessarily that we just put the ball in his hands at the end and he'll go win the game for us. There's no Blake Schilb that way. But I think the strength is that we'll make the extra pass or we'll do a good job defensively or we'll help each other. We've played a lot of road games, too - we've played six of them - so it's not as if we've been living at home and dominating that way. We've had some tough ones on the road, too. One thing the group will do is that they'll be pretty resilient and they'll stay after it. The strength of us is our group and it is definitely a group. We're not asking one guy to get 20 points and everyone else to get six or seven. We usually need three or four guys in double figures and we need a high assist-to-turnover ratio, and that's where I think we got frustrated tonight."

Loyola Junior Forward Andy Polka
On going 10-2 through the first 12 games
"We have a lot of young guys. The good thing about that is that they're new to this experience and they always have a lot of energy. Coach has done a good job preparing us thus far. We've had some good road victories and things like that to kind of toughen us up, but whenever you play a game like this, you're not satisfied. So we have to play a lot better."