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UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY BASKETBALL MEDIA CONFERENCENovember 17, 2014Matthew MitchellBaylor – 64 MATTHEW MITCHELL: Well, that's a great win for us. We have a long way to go as a basketball team, but learned a lot tonight, have a lot of room for improvement, but it's great to get into an atmosphere like this. I'm so appreciative of the fans for showing up tonight. It was an incredible atmosphere. We have a lot of respect for Baylor. They're so well coached and they're such a tough team, and it was a real tough test for us tonight, so our hats are off to Baylor. I know they'll have a great season. But really proud of our players. It was a very, very poor start to the game, and we came back and really played a tough 20 minutes there in the second half, and I'm very proud of them. We have a lot to learn, but this is a fun game to play in, and it was a great atmosphere, and we're just so tickled that we were able to win. Q. After Jen missed her first 10 three‑pointers, was there ever any doubt in your mind that she was going to make that 11th one? MATTHEW MITCHELL: No doubt that I was going to tell her to continue to shoot. I don't know whether they're going in or not. I'm cheering for every one of them to go in, and a lot of them looked good, and that's what we have to do. Jennifer O'Neill, the transition offense was creating wide‑open, clean looks from the three, and if you don't make them, you don't make them, but that kid makes shots, and I just continued to tell them in the huddle and I continued to tell her, we are creating‑‑ the transition was creating exactly what we were wanting it to. They were running back to a packed lane and we were shooting in‑rhythm wide‑open three‑point shoots, and our offense, we have to shoot that shot, and Jennifer is a great shooter and has been shooting the ball great, so I was happy‑‑ I don't have any‑‑ I'm not keeping up with that‑‑ I have no idea if she's missed them, made them. I'm just coaching every play, and I was telling her every time‑out to keep shooting the ball. Q. At what point do you say she's 0 for something, we need to get the ball to somebody else? Do you just always want her to shoot those? MATTHEW MITCHELL: If the offense creates a wide‑open three in rhythm for Jennifer O'Neill, she cannot turn that down. That's how our team is built. We try to wear you down, we try to run you back. I think you saw us start to get some wide‑open clean looks there at the end of the game. I think it was producing it. She's clearly one of our best players, one of our most talented players, and call me crazy, but that's just how we're going to play. She is a fantastic player, and she may make nine of 11 on Wednesday morning, you just don't ever know, but you've just got to trust what you do, and that's what we do, we shoot transition threes, if the offense creates it. We took some bad shots in the first half. Clearly it was a poor, poor performance, a lot of jitters, I guess, very lacking in focus. I mean, at halftime I just‑‑ I said, I don't know what you folks are doing out there. I have no idea what's going on in your mind. But we don't have a real complicated system here, and we needed to start settling down and showing some poise, and I thought they did a much better job in the second half. Q. Coach Mulkey didn't think that the crowd played much of a factor for them. I can't imagine you would feel the same way for your girls. MATTHEW MITCHELL: Yeah, for us it was fantastic. When you are emotionally down, when you're playing not well and you're sort of clearly discombobulated, and we, I thought, were lacking energy and emotion there as we were starting to decline in the first half, there's no question for us, once we started playing with some energy and the crowd responds, it pumps you up. I think that it was a great advantage for us tonight. For our players, I never can speak to what's going on with the opponent, but for us it was a huge lift. Just so grateful to work at a place like this where people care, and on a Monday night where it just is the worst weather ever, they show up and there's 20,000 people. You just have no idea how grateful and blessed we all are to play at a place like Kentucky. This is just unbelievable. It was an unbelievable night. Q. If I could speak to Matthew Mitchell the marketing major as well as the head coach, what does this do for the product tonight, and especially this kind of game, the way it ended? MATTHEW MITCHELL: Well, I don't know how Baylor feels, but as I was looking at it, it looked like all the hard work that we've done played a factor in the last 10 minutes of the game. Our brand is to play really up tempo and to be very disruptive, and we forced 24 turnovers and scored 50 points in a half. I think it does a lot for the brand. I mean, the brand is‑‑ you come here, you're going to‑‑ you're going to have an opportunity to, every day, work on being a great person. We're going to emphasize being a high‑character person and being a principle‑based person and making sacrifices for each other and being people of great preparation, and if you want to come and turn it loose and shoot after you've missed 10 in a row and your coach will still tell you to shoot, then come to Kentucky. It's a place to go. We're going to try to have some fun and get out there and run up and down the court and make some plays. I would say it's probably a good night for the brand. I don't know, it's just me talking, though, the marketing major. Q. You have a good blend of underclassmen, upperclassmen, but you've got some young players that don't seem afraid at all to be out there. I'm talking about Alyssa Rice. She looks like she's ready to play at this level, I mean, in this kind of a game. Makayla Epps, of course, showed a lot of leadership out there. MATTHEW MITCHELL: Uh‑huh, in the second half I think you saw what we can possibly start evolving into, and I would agree with you about Alyssa Rice. It looks like ‑‑ you're never going to be able to look at the box score and tell a whole lot about her right now, but as you observed, and I'm sure all of you, she was huge in the second half, just with her physical play on the boards, and she didn't get all the rebounds, but she kept some of the big kids from Baylor from getting them, and she played with a lot of tenacity. We have a very‑‑ we have the makings of a very good team. We are a long, long way away as you could see in the first half from being what we need to be. We're turning the ball over way too much. But we turned it over 19, we need to get it down to 14. We will address that. Azia Bishop turned it over four times. We'll get those things corrected. But it's just a process. Just the way the schedule hits us now, we don't have a lot of practice time, so we've got to make the most of our time here and try to get a little bit better and see if we can win some games while we're still learning. But that's why this one is so big and such a great win that will still show up at the end of the season, but we're not a finished product. It was great to be able to win while we're still learning. Q. Talk about Makayla Epps' game. It was huge for her in the second half, and she looked fired up after every single possession. MATTHEW MITCHELL: She loves Kentucky. She loves playing here. It means a lot to her. That's why I love having Kentucky kids on the team. It's no disrespect to the other kids; they love it, too. But she got down there and checked the floor a couple times, and it's just a little bit different for her. She was very, very fired up, and that was a good thing. She played the point, she played the wing and the post tonight, so she's a very, very versatile player and was impactful in all areas. She's only scratching the surface of what she can become. As you could see first half, very tentative, very passive, not aggressive, and she changed that around. I give our team a lot of credit because I'm telling you, it was not good in the first half, as you all could see. It was disjointed, there was no rhythm, there was no focus offensively, there was no execution. It was very, very poor, and so we have a lot of room to grow. We can get a lot better, and we need to. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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