What Saint Mary's coach Randy Bennett said about facing Alabama in NCAA Tournament

No. 2-seed Alabama will face 7-seed Saint Mary’s in the second round of the NCAA Tournament on Sunday, March 23, in Cleveland. Before facing the Crimson Tide, Gaels head coach Randy Bennett spoke to reporters on Saturday at Rocket Arena. Here is everything he said.

RANDY BENNETT: Yeah, you’re excited to play in the next round of the NCAA Tournament. You get to see teams like Alabama, teams you see in the rankings all the time and you’d like an opportunity to play against those type of teams, and we have that opportunity tomorrow. It’ll be contrasting styles of play. It should be a good game.

Q. What do you think of the point guard matchup, Mark Sears and Augustas, and connected to that, if there’s any example you can think of this year of Augustas’s leadership, poise, his experience showing in helping you guys?

RANDY BENNETT: Yeah, well, everybody knows who Sears is, first-team All-American, so it’ll be a good challenge. Gus is a good player, and he’s played against good ones the last four years. It’ll be good. Sears is good. They have others that are good, too. But he’s the head of the snake for sure, and he’s constantly attacking.

We’ll have to do a good job there. But it won’t be a one-on-one matchup. It’ll get down to team coverage and how you’re covering their team. But they’re so big in transition, I think that’s a big part of the deal.

As far as Augustas all year, he’s continued to improve. Last year he did what he did, and we did what we did. It’s hard to have that kind of year again, and he had that kind of year and better. And one of the reasons he’s better is his leadership has continued to improve.

I think just being over in the U.S. for another year, the fourth year, I think some of the language barrier stuff was a deal early, but it’s cool to see. He’s grown. He’s grown as a person. He’s grown as a leader. But being over here, being in the same program, being here four years, he’s kind of taken on more and more responsibility and become a better and better player.

Q. Looking at stats, Alabama leads the country in scoring, and I think Gonzaga is second. Is there a similarity between Gonzaga and Alabama, and if there is, do those three games this season help you for tomorrow?

RANDY BENNETT: There’s definitely a similarity. They both score a lot. We’ll be dealing with that.

But we’ve played — they have differences in how they do it, but they both have a really hard push, and they’re both relentless at it.

Alabama shoots more threes, and Gonzaga puts it inside more, but they both have really good point guards.

Yeah, we’ve seen this style of play — Santa Clara is that, too. They play that way a little more now, and Santa Clara is even more threes. They hit 12 threes a game. I think Alabama hits 10. I think Gonzaga hits about eight. But all three of them are really a hard push, hard transition, and they’ll look for threes all the time.

But yeah, Gonzaga is more — a little more inside, into the post. Yeah, they definitely go through Ike a lot, so that’s the difference.

Q. One more point guard question. Sears is fifth year, obviously Augustas is fourth. Curious your thoughts on that in a college basketball landscape where players don’t stay that long, to see two-point guards excelling at this point of their careers. How much does that help explain their impact, that they’ve been playing the game for that long?

RANDY BENNETT: Yeah, so there’s a huge advantage to having older players. You just don’t see as many young ones playing big minutes on really good teams now, and that’s totally because of the — well, this group is the last group of the COVID thing. But the NIL is keeping these guys around, too. They’re getting paid better money than they’ll get paid when they go overseas and play. So they stay in college. That’s the good thing about — one of the good things about the NIL is these guys stay longer.

The quality of teams, I said this the other day, the quality of teams 1 through 60 has improved. The depth in college basketball now, these teams are good. We saw one the other day, Vanderbilt, they had a bunch of guys that transferred in. They’re just all old. You just don’t see these teams that have young ones playing big roles very often. If they are, they’re probably going in the draft the next year.

This is a classic example, but even like Nembhard in our league, he’s a fifth-year guy. These fifth-year guys keep playing and they’ve played all the way up like Augustas has, they play all the way up. They get good because they get so many reps playing against good competition. I think you just see it more and more, as long as this NIL stays around.

Q. Some of the players talked about that 2010 Sweet 16 team and Coach McConnell being on it. I’m curious, when you get in this setting, what do you remember about that run and how does this team compare or contrast to that team?

RANDY BENNETT: Well, we didn’t see it coming with that team. We showed up and we played Richmond in the first round and that was a game like last night, pretty 50/50 game. And then we played Villanova in the next round. We had a little chip on our shoulders. We played well — we didn’t look like we were that good a team, but we were a good team, and we didn’t play that many guys, but the guys we played were good and they fit together, pieces fit well. It just kind of happened.

This team, we have a chance for that to happen this year. We’ve been in this position three out of the last four years to get to the next round. It’s hard to punch through, and that’s what we’re trying to do. Yeah, we’ve kind of — like Saxen said, forget about making those guys, let’s get a new team we’re talking about in that position. It’s hard to do, though. Those guys are a special team. In Moraga, Bay Area, those guys are still well known as the team that went to the Sweet 16.

Q. Along with the players, somebody said at this point it’s good to win the first round, but the excitement is kind of gone, it’s just about being focused on winning. I’m wondering for you, as long as you’ve been coaching if there’s been any times in the past where you’ve felt that way, with the excitement being gone, just wanting to win, or if there’s any difficulty to keeping yourself and your team pumped up and looking forward to the next day.

RANDY BENNETT: No, it’s the same. It’s the same. So hard to get in this tournament. I say that all the time. People don’t really understand it unless you’re in our shoes and have to go through the grind every year. It feels like you have to win every game.

We had to go 17-1 in the league. I don’t know if we went 15-3 if we would have made it. It’s that tight.

So no, you’re excited to be in it, and then once it comes game time, you’re excited to compete, and you know you’re going to be playing against a tough team in a cool venue. The crowd yesterday was unbelievable. Those things you just — it’s hard to explain to players how special it is, and then they get in it and they see.

Some guys, yeah, shoot, it affects things. The advantage for us is we’ve had guys who have played in this, and like I said, this third time we’ve played in this game. So they at least know the feelings, the emotions, the nerves that you will have going into this game.

The first game is different than the second game. Now we’re here in the second game. The second game, you already played in this venue. The excitement of just playing in the NCAA Tournament is a little bit gone, and now it’s just more the excitement of trying to advance and get to the next round, get to the second weekend, which there’s a pressure there and there’s an excitement there.

But in no way is it less. It’s just as intense as it was the first time, the second time, third time, on and on.

Q. Wanted to ask you a little bit, as you continue to go deeper into the tournament, there’s more and more draft picks, NBA pro players. For your five seniors that have been with you for a long time, how does the experience in the West Coast Conference of playing against draft picks, guys like Chet Holmgren against Jalen Williams, Podziemski, how does that impact their ability to play against some of these guys tomorrow like Sears that are going to be draft picks?

RANDY BENNETT: Yeah, I think we play at a high level. We try and do that in non-conference, and then we get to do it in conference. And lately, our league has been putting out some good NBA players, and people — they might not be as well-known as a Sears, but Jalen Williams is a heck of a player. He’s starting for the Warriors. The guys at Gonzaga, Sabonis, keep going. They’ve had a bunch of them, and we’ve had some.

I don’t spend as much time with our guys talking about — we’ve seen these caliber of teams because they kind of know. They kind of know now, if you’re winning in our league, you have to beat some really good teams.

Just like the scoring — these guys score so much and their pace of play — it’ll be tough to defend. It always is and Alabama is really good. We all know that. But it’s not like we haven’t seen it. We’ve seen it. You just have to play well on that night and do a good job of doing the things that we do that have gotten us here —

Q. Augustas was just telling me about how you recruited him over Zoom and you were driving around on golf carts showing him the campus, and he was like, I have no idea what I’m looking at. What drew you to him in the first place? You’ve had guys, Delly and Patty that have gone on from here to the league. Is he a guy that could conceivably make that jump?

RANDY BENNETT: — well, I’ll answer the last part first. I definitely think he can make that jump. We’ve had a lot of good point guards. He’s at the top. He’s right there, and we’ve had some good ones. I’ve seen him enough that I don’t know why he wouldn’t make it. He’s a little under the radar, but what he’s done the last two years has been impressive. He’s a good player. He’s really good on both sides of the ball. He’s a good defender. He’s got a nice little gap to improve still.

As a freshman, there was times I couldn’t even play him, and we were hoping to play him at that time, and he just had to grow through that. He was really an innocent kid, and you’d think because he’s a Marciulionis that it’s automatic, hey, this guy is a pro. It wasn’t like that. He had to learn how to bring it every night. He had to learn how to practice every day hard. He had to learn how to work harder, develop his skills.

He has, and now he’s getting to things you have to do as you become a really good player and lead and run the team and be cerebral and be a coach on the floor. I alluded to it earlier, the language barrier was a little bit of an issue early just because in his country — he communicates with mostly Americans and Australians, and he wasn’t comfortable doing that yet. He hadn’t lived over here. He wasn’t one of those guys. He lived in Lithuania his whole life and spoke Lithuanian. He could speak English pretty good, but he had to get better there.

He’s had to do all those things. I think he’s a pro.

I knew his dad. Random thing when he got the job at Saint Mary’s, a friend of — he knew about Saint Mary’s, local guy, knew is a ruin ass well because is a ruin ass played at Golden State and moved there for a while before he moved back to Lithuania. So one day he said, I want you to meet Sarunas, and we went to breakfast, and I met him.

Then Sarunas wanted me to come over and — he had a basketball academy there that he ran. So I went over there and visited for a couple days and got to know him a little bit. And then when he picked me up at the airport, he had this little one-year-old sitting on the little middle part in the car, and he’s buzzing around — he picked me up. That was Augustas. I didn’t know. I was like, this is crazy, he doesn’t even have a seatbelt on and he’s whipping around these streets (laughter).

Anyway, I stayed in touch with Sarunas with no plan of anything. He’s a friend, just a great guy. Then I was reading some of the scouting report at breakfast one day, I remember there’s this guy named Augustas Marciulionis on this 16-year-old or 17-year-old scouting report. I was like, that’s got to be the kid.

So I called him and found out, that’s him. I had no idea he was a player. I called Sarunas and said, hey, if your kid wants to come to college, we’d love to recruit him. That’s exactly how the connection was.

He didn’t know if he was coming over or not. Then when he got to the point where he had to make a decision, he decided he was. I think his dad wanted him to and he wanted to. But it wasn’t like he grew up, man, I can’t wait to play U.S. basketball. He was very proud of where he was playing, and he’s big in the Lithuanian basketball community. U-17s, U-19s, he’s in all that stuff. So he came over, he liked it. We’re riding around in a golf cart, and he had no idea about anything about our school. It was kind of funny.

Anyhow, but he was coming to Saint Mary’s and went from there.

But like I said, he was pretty naïve. He was just an innocent kid. He’s had to go through the things every 18-year-old in the United States would have to go through, only they didn’t grow up here. That’s what he’s done, and he’s just a heck of a nice kid.

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