He's two-for-two now. I think his leadership and being able to get off to an early start like that has helped the other players to feed a little bit off of his momentum. He's very consistent and has improved even more this year.

Early in the season, I went and printed off the state field from last year and told the guys we'd be right in the middle of the 12 teams,

I think that a great part of healing was I didn't sit and despair about 'woe is me. Why me? Why me?' I never had that time.

It's kind of been a problem since the start of the year. We haven't been able to come out on a team and keep them down the whole game. We've gotten lackadaisical and then built the lead back up again. We've kind of been all over the place, and we really need to fix that.

We wanted to get started early. It's too late in the tournament to start behind.

It got hairy at the end, but it's going to be hairy at times. You've just got to be able to find a way to win. The importance of it is being able to stop the run.