What Leon Rice said after Boise State men’s basketball’s bounce-back win over Utah Valley

‘We had some adversity, obviously. We took it and we learned from it,’ Rice said

Boise State Broncos head coach Leon Rice. | Orlando Ramirez-Imagn Images

The Boise State men’s basketball team regrouped from a season-opening loss to Division II Hawaii Pacific on Saturday with a 101-77 home victory over Utah Valley. 

Georgetown transfer Drew Fielder led the way for the Broncos (1-1) with 20 points and six rebounds. Andrew Meadow added 18 points, three steals and two assists. 

“A perfect response,” Boise State head coach Leon Rice said after the game. “We had some adversity, obviously. We took it and we learned from it. There is no failure if you learn from it. There’s failure if you quit, there’s failure if you don’t learn from it or worry about it. You’ve just got to move on, turn the page and get better.”

Here are the highlights from Rice’s postgame comments. 

On bouncing back from Hawaii Pacific loss 

“We’ve had some great moments already — and I’m counting the exhibition against Idaho. The thing about coaching is you’ve got to keep carving away those bad things and keep building on ‘Look at how good this is. Let’s keep doing this, keep doing this, keep doing this.’ And you saw some of that tonight. We had stretches of really, really good and we had stretches where you’re scratching your head going ‘Man, if we keep doing that, they have no chance to stop it.’ That’s where our guys have to understand to not try to trick the game. Just understand what works, and keep doing it.”

On most impressive elements of Boise State’s response 

“Just our approach and our practices. We had three really good practices with attention to detail, with getting better at the things we had to get better at. And that was just three practices, OK. We don’t sit around and pat ourselves on the back. We’ve got until midnight to enjoy it, and then we’ve got to turn the page quick and get better at some more things. Because they scored 77 points against us and shot too high of a percentage. The reason they did that is because — especially early — they were getting all their buckets at the rim. … If we can shore that up, they would’ve scored about 57. And then you’ve got something.”

On balanced scoring effort 

“Our depth can help us, but our depth … there can’t be big ranges of how guys play. You need to bring what you bring consistently, and that starts with your effort and energy and rebounding, because that’s where the energy shows up. And that’s what we can measure, too. Guys who have great rebounding games usually have a great (overall) game that goes along with it.”