My family's grown up here. I've done a million things here that I'm really proud of. (And) 99.9 percent of the time I've been treated better than I ever envisioned that I'd be treated. So I'm not looking to go anywhere. I'm not looking to run away from anything. I'm not looking to find greener pastures. |
My hope is that sometime in the next 24 hours, we play as close to our ability as we can. I wouldn't be at all disappointed if around 11:30 [Tuesday night], I'm saying that's the best game we played all year. That would be pretty good. Right now, we need to play one of the best games we've played. |
My initial reaction right now is I saw where it's going to be announced during the Final Four. So if I'm sitting here in Connecticut and there's four teams playing in Boston at the Final Four and I get a phone call, my first reaction is I'm going to be (mad) that I'm not at the Final Four. I can tell you that much. So if I happen to be in Boston with my team and I get that phone call, it'll be kind of a special weekend. |
My opinion of the whole thing is it's a joke. The coach of that team should have his head examined. |
Nerves are not an issue. To me, Ann Strother is a perfect example of someone who came in here as a freshman and was never afraid to take the big shot, to have the ball in crucial situations. Some kids are just different and they have it in them. She does. |
Nicole probably feels like it's more important to get on with the rest of her life and what she wants to do. Nicole's a smart kid and obviously she put a lot of thought into it. |
No one ever talks about our defense. Our defense has always been good. But when you have great offensive players like I've coached the last 15 years, it's hard to concentrate on our defense. But our defense has been pretty good. |
Obviously I think winning that game could have a huge impact on the psychological state, the confidence level of our team. That's obvious. But at the same time, we're home. We're Connecticut. Everybody think we're one of the top-10 teams in the country. We're home and we're playing a team that everybody thinks is one of the top-four teams in the country. Going into the game, yeah, we expect to win this game. That's what you're supposed to think if you're us. |
Obviously in the long term, as the season wears on, there's no way you can be as good a team without someone who is, I think, one of the best five players in the league. Meg can put up 20 points every night, and that has to be comforting. But this West Virginia team is still one of the best that I've seen. That team is very difficult to play against. |
Obviously, coming off a game like that, we've got a lot of work to do. It's never easy to lose, and especially difficult to lose when a conference championship is at stake. It's magnified when we play as well as we did for 15 minutes and then go completely the other way. It takes the life out of you completely. |
Obviously, you can?t discount how much (Diana) meant because nobody?s ever meant more to any team than Diana has meant to this group of kids. So if you want to compare them to Diana, they fall short, but so does everybody else. |
Offensively I think we're doing a lot more things, and a lot better, than we've done them in a long time. But that first half left some things to be desired. No question about that. |
One of the dangers that you run into when you have success so early, people tend to forget. It?s better to have success late then early because an awful lot of people may end up remembering whatever happened last year or whatever is going to happen this year. |
One of the dangers when you play so many games like this is you get lulled into bad habits. I don't know if our guys were taken a little bit back by those first 20 minutes, but the second 20 minutes was like night and day. That is a little bit worrisome for me. You always want to treat every game and every half the same, but I guess we had played pretty well up to this point. That was the first bad 20 minutes we have played in a while. |
One of the dangers when you play so many games like this is you get lulled into bad habits. That first half we were just content to go up and down and trade baskets. Army did exactly what I thought they would do. They were patient, they run their stuff, they grind it out. |