Technician: What are your expectations for the season?

Towe: We are expecting a lot of good things from a lot of the players on the team. All of these guys have been working really hard and are coming together as a team, which is really important. I am not sure what that translates into as it pertains to wins and losses but I think that will take care of itself. I really like the direction this team is headed. The veteran players that returned from last year’s team are better than they were a year ago. The freshman have come in and really done a good job and picked things up really well. I just expect a lot of good things out of this team.

Technician: What have you seen from this team that gives you hope that the team will finish better than it has in recent years?

Towe: I do not really compare teams from recent years. I just know that good teams are unselfish and try to play really good defense. If you want to be a good basketball team, you have to care about each other, and that leads to your team to being unselfish. It doesn’t matter who scores the basket, it’s that we score a basket. Defensively you have to take easy baskets away and bring percentages down on the other team. I think this team is going to make the sacrifice to be a good team defensively. Those two qualities – the fact that they are really unselfish and they are concentrating on playing good defense – generally translates into having a good basketball team.

Technician: How is the depth in the frontcourt this year?

Towe: We miss all of those guys that are not here; they are great kids and they did what they are supposed to do. But, it is going to make a great opportunity for Tracy Smith and Dennis Horner to step up. Overall, I think this team may be a bit bigger than we were a year ago with the addition of [Jordan] Vandenberg, [DeShawn] Painter. Scott Wood has good size, Josh Davis had good size, and so overall it seems to me that we are a bigger team.

Technician: What do you expect this year out of the point guard position?

Towe: I think both [Javier] Gonzalez and [Julius] Mays played a little bit more at an earlier stage than they were prepared to do and now they are more ready to play that position than they ever have been before, and that should translate into the best point guard play we have had since Engin Atsur was running our club two years ago.

Technician: What is the plan for trying to play a more up-tempo style of offense?

Towe: We are trying to just pick up the pace a bit. It is the style that everyone would like to play and the fans enjoy seeing people go up and down the floor and putting more points up, and we are trying to do that. What we want is every time someone gets ready to play North Carolina State University this year, is that one thing in the scouting report, is that they have to know that they have to get back on defensive every possession. We are going to be trying to push the ball up the floor and get an early scoring opportunity and if there is nothing there, we will settle down and run our half court offense.

Technician: What is your opinion on the preseason polls?

Towe: I do not know how much weight we actually hold them, but we are all aware of them. Myself, I would prefer to have high expectations and be preseason number one. But those are media things that are fan driven and we do not have any control over them. We always talk to our players about controlling the things you can control and that is definitely something you can’t control. We are who we are, and we feel good about ourselves and the coaches feel good about the team and know it’s time for us to go out and play some other people and see how we stack up.