Notre Dame's players focusing on surviving and advancing
The Notre Dame men’s basketball team is pointing to recent success in the NCAA Tournament as a springboard to make another deep run.
The team beat Princeton 60-58 to advance to the next round of the tournament.
“That was the first game of the tournament, a lot of emotions going crazy. Little jittery during the game, you don’t know what to expect. I think we learned a lot about ourselves in what we can do," said junior Bonzie Colson.
The past feels a lot like the present.
“You look at the past history of our nucleus, it was very much like the Northeastern game in ’15, we had to fight like heck to win and then we got on a nice run and even the Michigan game we were down 11 or 12 at halftime last year and sometimes tough games can get you going. This group has experienced it and I hope they feel the same way," Head Coach Mike Brey said.
The first game is over, now it's on to the next.
“You know it’s just a relief after that and now we’re going into a game where we’re the lower seed, and we play with nothing to lose anyway, so it’s just a good feeling to have that monkey off your back," said senior VJ Beachem.
“We’ve got guys that have been in this situation before and we’ve got guys that our experienced so when it comes down to in this tournament, it’s all about winning you got to do whatever it takes to win," junior Matt Farrell said.
Notre Dame plays West Virginia on Saturday at 12:10 p.m.