Oct. 17, 2010

Recap |  Box Score

Wisconsin Head Coach Pete Waite:

Opening statement: It was great to get a win in the Big Ten. To get the monkey off our back, the team played well. They obviously had some nice comebacks during the sets. They didn't have to play out of their minds but just a steady game.  It was kind of funny at the end, on the bench one of my assistants, Brian, thought that maybe the crowd would be rushing the floor, like after the football game (referring to Wisconsin's victory over Ohio State).  They didn't do it but we thought that might have been fun also.

On Julie Mikaelsen coming off the bench to spark the team: "That isn't something we plan on. Mary's really been doing well. Mary really earned the spot in there, she had been improving her game. For this match, she came in and she was making some errors and her game just wasn't on and so Julie was ready to go obviously. She's started for us before and she's always eager to be in there and I think that did make a big difference. It kind of sparked us and being a lefty too makes a difference, she's pretty hard to stop. But I think some of the other stories are Elise Welch and the numbers she put up. She had not been doing that recently and she really had a great hitting percentage and led us in kills. Overall great team effort.

On the comeback in the first set: "In the first set, we were down 16-20. At a timeout, we talked about making a comeback and driving the momentum. That was huge to give us hope to say that we can do that anytime in this match. That if we came back from four points down to win that set, we can do it again. Better yet, let's get the lead and play from behind.  And that's what they started doing. Defensively, also, we were playing much better defense out there today (in comparison to Friday night).

On keeping Purdue out of offense: "Our serving was pretty good, kept them out of the offense. We were touching balls on the block, we had six blocks but sometimes you deflect them and slow them down. I think that's how we got a lot of our digs. At other times, you channel them to the defense. That's what worked pretty well for us.
Allison Wack on the differences between Friday night's match on today: "I think part of it was maybe that we were making some of the same defensive plays. But on Friday night, we would make a hitting error and give it away. It kills your energy when you do one thing and we just gave them points. But today, for the most part, we pretty much stayed within ourselves, we didn't give Purdue a ton of points.  I think that's easy when you're not making a ton of errors to just keep rolling.

Kim Kuzma on the momentum the Badgers had: "Momentum is always huge. I just think that we were playing well. We were having fun out there and when we have fun, we play well and when we play well, we have fun. Momentum wise, once you do get a few points, you're like `Let's go. Let's go.' We were feeling good about ourselves.