Northern Illinois head coach Carol Owens post-game quotes
December 07, 2008 | Women's Basketball
Opening Statement: 'The first half we just gave up too many points. Rebounding is our strength and we didn't do a really good job. I thought Wisconsin did a great job of keeping us off the board in the first half. In the second half we did a few different things to come back in the game and our kids fought hard, but I thought we played a good team that was consistent all along even though we were coming back. So I thought that there were some good things that we can take from it and we have to learn from this game. But when you have a player like (Alyssa) Karel that is hard to defend'she's a 3-point shooter, she can drive 'and we gave her different looks, and she was hard to defend but I think that 's good for our team to learn and to look at this film and learn from it. '
On the rebounding in the first half versus the second: 'I think it was a matter of them obviously being more aggressive. I was really disappointed in our offensive rebounding productivity. We got 12 total, and most of them were in the second half, but I thought that once we started being aggressive, we needed to get offensive rebounds in order to have a chance to stay in this game and I thought we did that.'
On preparing to defend Alyssa Karel: 'Well as a coach I learned my lesson to not put too much emphasis on just one person. But obviously we talked about not giving her open looks. When we went to the zone, obviously in the zone you're going to give up some three's, and she happened to be the person that we gave up the three's on, so she was a hard guard for us. We tried to do a box-and-one on her but we allowed her to get the ball in the box-and-one. We can't allow that. But she's a special player. She 's very savvy and she knows how to get her shots and I think that's what makes her a really good player.'
