HELENA — As the Carroll College men's basketball team looks to remain atop the Frontier Conference standings, 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: This past weekend, you officially returned from the holiday break. You hosted Dakota State. You hosted Bellevue. You went 1-1 in those games, two really close games. Just what were your takeaways?
Dan Pearson: I mean, for us, it was a perfect weekend for what you want out of a return. We get challenged early. So, with a young team, we're always in a good space when we feel like there's things that we can take away and improve on. It's kind of just the process you go through. So, with both of those games, we felt like we saw things that we hadn’t necessarily seen throughout the course of the year.
And so, we’re still in a good space in the conference, so I’m happy with the weekend as a whole.
MTN Sports: Talking about being in a good space, 8-0 is the best start to conference play in program history. You’re ranked at No. 15 in the national poll. That’s the first time you’ve been ranked since 2022. Are you paying attention to any of that? Are the guys paying attention to any of that?
Dan Pearson: You know, the thing that's special about our group — and I mean, you can come to a game, and you can watch just the interactions between our players and officials, our players and other players — they're just a low-key bunch. They compete hard. They don’t talk. They don't get wrapped up with stuff. I haven't heard an ounce of anybody speaking about anything besides the day to days. So, for us, like the culture that we want to build as guys that just really focus on the stuff that's right away present in front of us.
MTN Sports: When we zoom out and we look at the college basketball season as a whole, it has three parts. There’s an early season, non-conference part. There's the bulk of conference play. And then you get into the postseason, the conference tournament. Right now, we're solidly into that middle third. Where do you think the team stands, or how much more room for growth do you think there still is?
Dan Pearson: If you look at our schedule from last year, I think from basically that January, mid-January on stage was when we finally kind of caught some stride. We were young last year, and it took us until about that time to have ourselves a healthy end to the conference season. Somehow we went and got younger this year.
And so, the fact that we are in a good early space is in a lot of ways a little bit of a surprise, but we're happy with it. We do expect, you know, because of the youth that we have, that when you make mistakes, you get to grow from those things because you're a bunch of 18-, 19-year-old kids playing basketball at the college level for the first time. So, we feel like there's a ton of growth to be had, both in this year and then just as a program as a whole, kind of moving forward.
