Q and A with Pat Knight

Texas Tech head coach Pat Knight visited Brownsville on Thursday and held an open mic session where he fielded questions from local athletes, coaches and basketball fanatics at the Brownsville Events Center. Knight took over as head coach for the Red Raiders after his father Bob Knight resigned 20 games into 2007-08 season. His father known as "The General," holds the record for the most wins (902) in NCAA Division I history, won three national championships at Indiana in 1976, 1981 and 1987, coached the 1984 U.S. team (that featured among others Michael Jordan) to gold and was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1991. It was in this unique atmosphere that Pat Knight grew up and learned the game of basketball from some of the best to ever play and/or coach the sport. Thursday night he sat down with The Herald to talk Red Raider basketball.

Q: What's the state of the program with you taking over?

A: It's good. We have three very good freshmen and two played a lot for us last season. We have some good kids returning and we signed some good kids that will be here in the fall. So things are on the up and he (Bob Knight) wanted to make sure that he didn't leave me with the cupboard bare.

Q: Where does Tech fit in to the Texas high school recruiting battles with teams such as UT, A&M and now even Baylor?

A: UT's always out there ahead of all of us, but you want to get to a point where you're on an even keel. Right now there's Texas and the rest of us. With the last couple of year's we've had, making it to the tournament a couple of times, we're slowly catching up.

Q: How much of a hand in recruiting did you have as an assistant coach?

A: I was the main guy, I oversaw all the recruiting and went out all the time. I actually had the final say-so on kids. It's nice because now as the head coach I'm used to having the final say.

Q: How does your style compare with your dad's in respect to both X's and O's and in dealing with the different personalities on the team?

A: Personality wise we're a lot alike, we're both extremely competitive and I just grew up that way. As far as X's and O's the only real difference is that I play a little more zone defense. We both run the motion offense but I learned the zone from him. He didn't like to play it, he likes to play man-to-man but I learned the zone from him. He gets on me about running so much of it but I just tell him that I learned it from him.

Q: Since you have been at Tech you've had a guard or small forward step up and lead the way be-ginning with Andre Emmett all the way to Martin Zeno last year. Who's the next guy to take that mantle?

A: Voskul will be a kid next year that could do it but then you have to look at Roberson and Sin-gletary, two freshman that started a lot of games coming in there. Then there's these junior college kids we're bringing in that we didn't recruit to sit on the bench. I want more guys contributing more next year and I think we can get it.

Q: What would you point to as the main reason for Alan Voskul's development from a reserve player to a dependable scorer and leader?

A: We just worked him hard. We knew he could score but you know our offense really helps him a lot. I don't know if he could be doing all of this playing for anybody else. We set screens for him and get the ball to him in places where he can flat out shoot. He had a couple of good games his freshman year and then more last year and then this year I really think he took off. Now though what he's got to get used to is being a marked man, he's not a surprise anymore. Steve Alford actually helped him out a lot after we played New Mexico. He's a similar player to what Alford was and he showed him how to come off screens, and how to get open. I look for him to have a really good senior year but if he's going to do that then some of these other guys are going to have to pick it up. He's not the only guy out there that can score, so we got to have some of the other guys take some of the pressure off of him.

Q: Speaking of pressure, how much more pressure is there for you as the head man now as op-posed to as an assistant?

A: Oh that's an easy question. As the head coach you can be fired. You just move over six inches and now it's all on you.

Q: How much of a head start did you get by being the head coach over the last third of the season?

A: Huge, because I'm not going through the honeymoon period. You know I got some game expe-rience, my players saw my personality, what I want to implement offensively and on defense. So now, we can change this from a recruiting standpoint and there probably won't be some guys returning with us from this year. Our weight lifting and conditioning now performs the way I want to play to get ready for next year, so all of that just gave me a huge jump start. My dad said that everyone was going to think he was crazy but to trust him that everything was going to work out for good and it did. He was right you know, this is going to make me better for next year and give me a running start. So now we got all that out of the way.