Women's basketball versus William ' Mary coaches quotes
November 14, 2010 | Women's Basketball
Nov. 14, 2010
Coach Lisa Stone on game:
“I am real proud of our team. I give William & Mary a lot of credit, that is a nice basketball team and they play hard. Double-zero, (Tanisha) Pye is a very good player, their 3-point shooters are very good, and it tested us. Their half-court pressure was something we had to work against, and this is a good game for us. But we are short-handed, we are now down to nine players, but we are slowly getting back healthy. I thought our second half performance was much better, we left some points at the free throw line the first half, but we shored that up in the second half. Again, defensively is where we are going to get it done and I was really proud of our team.”
Coach Stone on post play and Tara Steinbauer:
“Well (assistant coach) Oties (Epps) said to me during the game, he said, ‘Tara is our John Clay.’ And I told Tara and she liked that comparison. And that was good, she found some ways to get her hands on the ball and finish inside. But our strength is our interior game right now, and we need touches and I thought we shared the ball very well in the second half, and took pretty good care of it. Everybody got to play once again, and you are seeing our young players get better and better all the time, this experience that they are gaining is invaluable, and hopefully we can keep getting better.”
Coach Stone on defense, low shooting percentage of opponents:
“Well, if we can keep that up we will play those percentages, I like those percentages. We have a tough one on the road coming up and we have got some things to talk about prior to our trip to Green Bay, but I like what I see. We are getting better, we are paying attention to detail on the defensive end, and that is very good. I thought Jade Davis did a nice job on double-zero contesting shots, she is a really good player and we did a good job there. Boxing out is still something we can work on, we are nowhere near perfect yet, but we are getting better and it is nice to have the first one at home as a win.”
Coach Stone on Wisconsin turning the ball over just eight times:
“That is really important Mike, I was kind of searching on all these papers over here to find turnovers and I cannot see it. But we had five at the half, that means only three in the second half, that is awesome. That will be fun to share with the team, because last Sunday, a week ago, we had 16 and we know what that does for us. When we can take care of the ball on the other end, it puts our defense in a much better situation. So a great stat to celebrate.”
Coach Stone on getting to the free throw line:
“Yeah, we are getting there, we need to convert more, we missed the front ends of a couple in the first half, but second half, as I said, we showed improvement. Made shots and getting to the free throw line, making free throws becomes contagious, and I thought it did in the second half. But we have got a great group of women in there. We have got to get healthy quickly and just take tomorrow off and get ready for the next game.”
Coach Stone on Green Bay and availability of Alyssa Karel:
“That decision will be made this week, I would like to say that she, Tiera (Stephen), and Anya (Covington) will all be at full strength, but I cannot make that decision right now. I can pray for what I want it to be, but right now the next player in is doing a great job and I am really proud of them.”
William & Mary Head Coach Debbie Taylor on the game:
“I thought defensively the first 30 minutes we hung. We are down a few kids right now, but I thought we played hard. We just need to put the ball in the basket and show a little more patience on the offensive end of the floor. The offense we run is one where you need to pass the ball around five, six, seven, eight times. We took some bad shots, we missed some easy shots, five or six of the shots were open layups and we shot 50 percent from the free throw line. But if you are going to come up here and play a Big Ten team, you have to put the ball in the basket. But I was proud of the defensive effort for about 70 percent of the game. But offensively we just have to be more patient and score.”
Coach Taylor on the half court pressure against Wisconsin:
“It was more for us. We typically press on made baskets and we just don’t have the bodies to do it right now. So I thought with them not have a starting point guard, we would just throw in a little pressure just to rattle them and make them make some decisions. Because I thought that was the one thing in watching their exhibition games and some of their games in the past that just changing things up might help a little bit. We tried to do that for a little while but we just didn’t have the bodies to keep it up. I just didn’t want to wear the kids out. It thought it was effective and it created a few turnovers but they got a couple layups on it too which was going to happen. We just wanted to keep them off guard a little bit. They started going through our zone (defense) pretty quickly in the second half so we had to take that off too.”
Coach Taylor on if anything Wisconsin did surprised them:
"Steinbauer was bigger than I thought she would be. She was taller. I didn’t think she was that tall. She is better than I thought she was too. She is a good player. My big concern for this game was in stopping Zastrow and I thought we did a good job with her. So we were going to double team the post. I don’t think she (Zastrow) passes well out of double team and I thought we did a good job of containing her tonight and not giving her a lot of back-to-the-basket looks."
"Steinbauer made nine 3s last year, she made two tonight. You play the odds and on the first two we lost, but she is a great player."
"Other than that I thought we pretty much got what we saw on film. They are a team that plays well together. They play a pack-line defense, they move the ball and you’ve got to make them adjust. They rebound the ball pretty well but the strength of their team is their interior. So we held one of them I think pretty well but didn’t do a good job with the other."
