North Carolina State University Athletics
Lowe & McCauley Meet With ACC Media
10/26/2008 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
ATLANTA, GA. - Coach Sidney Lowe and senior Ben McCauley traveled down to Atlanta, Ga., and took part in the annual ACC Media Day on Sunday. With the day starting with a 7:00 a.m. flight, both player and coach met with various members of the print, video, and radio media for about four hours at the Marriott Marquis. In a bit of comedy to end the long media session, Roy Williams offered to give the duo a ride back on UNC's charted jet, but Lowe and McCauley decided to stick to their commerical flight back from Atlanta.
SIDNEY LOWE:
“Brandon (Costner) really dedicated himself this past summer, and you can tell he has lost some weight. He is a great 'big' to have on this team. He can take it inside, and obviously he is one of our better outside shooters.”
“Farnold (Degand) still has a little bit of a ways to go. His knee is improving each day we are out there, and you can tell how the quickness is returning to his game. He is working on his timing right now, being away from such a long time, that is the hardest part about missing time. I still say the biggest key to last season was when Farnold went down.”
“Last year is done, and we have to move on. We don’t want to totally forget what happened last season, because we don’t ever want to go through that again. We have to go out there and perform as good as I think we are capable of doing.”
“As far as our personal, I think we are moving towards being more uptempo this season. I think that is our goal. We have some people in positions now that can really run and increase our pace. Moving Courtney (Fells) to the small forward is really an example. But you still have to go out and execute the half court offense. I don’t want to run and gun, but take advantage of turnovers and push the ball off of rebounds.”
BEN MCCAULEY:
“Coach Lowe always says If you are open, there is no such thing as a bad shot’. That gives our shooters confidence in that our head coach has confidence in their ability.
“I think preseason has gone really well thus far. We are all on the same page, and we know what it takes to be successful as a unit.”
“I think we will run more this year, increase our tempo. Coach Lowe has working on getting us up and down the floor in practice and into a faster transition game. The point guards now have experience running this team, and we all feed off that confidence that they have. We are going to try to push tempo more, but we still play inside-out, and create those open looks for our shooters.”
“I worked on my mid-range game a lot this summer, around 15 feet from the basket. I’m trying to perfect the art of the mid-range, and we play inside-out so well I thought why not get involved with that shooting.”
2008-09 ACC Predicted Order of Finish:
1. North Carolina (40) 480
2. Duke 436
3. Wake Forest 354
4. Miami 344
5. Clemson 306
6. Virginia Tech 298
7. Maryland 192
8. Georgia Tech 186
9. NC State 179
10. Florida State 145
11. Boston College 123
12. Virginia - 79
