HELENA — As the Carroll College men's basketball team looks toward its final games of the regular season this weekend, MTN Sports' Jonny Walker sat down with Fighting Saints coach Dan Pearson.
A full transcript from the video interview with Pearson is available below:
MTN Sports: You got your final games of the regular season coming up this weekend when you go to Valley City State and Mayville State. What improvement are you still looking to see out of this team in this final stretch of the regular season?
Dan Pearson: Yeah, I mean, I think this is going to be something that we're dealing with probably up into the maybe even mid-portion of next year with a lot of youth that we have. The goal for us is to see if we can stretch together 40 minutes. Throughout the course of the season, we've had stretches. We'll play 35 really good minutes, 36 really good minutes, and then there's always kind of these dips that show up at some point.
So, we want to mellow those things out as we finalize the regular season going into the postseason, because we feel like that's the difference between us being a good team this year and a team that can go do something special.
MTN Sports: You're coming up on the end of your second regular season as head coach at Carroll. If you zoom out a little bit, how far has this program come from when you first took over to right now?
Dan Pearson: I mean, I would like to say that there's improvement and there's growth. This year we were genuinely in a space where we felt like we were chasing a conference championship in the regular season in a really competitive 12-team league. For us to be in the hunt on that, to have the record that we have at this stage of the season, all of those are improvements.
MTN Sports: Right now, you're second place in the Frontier Conference standings with 16 wins in conference play already. As you look ahead to the conference tournament, how important is it to you to have a really good high seed, or is it more about how the team is playing when you get to that part of the season?
Dan Pearson: I mean, at this point it's both, right? Because if we're playing really well going into this last two games of the season, then we will secure a high seed. I think, because of the pace and style that we play, the structure of the tournament gives you a Friday first-round (game), if you're a first or second place.
So, you play your games on Friday and then you get Saturday to rest. It's just enough of a difference between having to try to go win three games in a row where we want to press for 40 minutes, want to run in transition for 40 minutes. It's just asking a little bit more. So I think we've got to be playing our best, and then obviously if we can get a higher seed, it helps us.
