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UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN VOLLEYBALL MEDIA CONFERENCEDecember 7, 2015Kelly SheffieldMadison, Wisconsin COACH SHEFFIELD: First of all, really appreciate all the fans that came out this past weekend. That Field House was as loud as I've heard it for both of those matches and was appreciated and needed. We're obviously excited about being one of the -- there are 334 teams in the country, and to be one of the 16 that are still playing and to be able to do it with a group that you really enjoy being in the gym with. We're fortunate and excited about that. We've got a really tough, big group in front of us. You look at Florida and Texas and UCLA, those are three traditional thoroughbreds in our sport. To have all three of them and to play them at Texas, we're excited. We've got Florida in front of us, and that is they might be as talented of a team -- they might be the most talented team in the country. They've got four All-Americans, four returning All-Americans and that doesn't include the national Freshman of the Year from a few year's back. So a lot of talent on the other side of the net. We're starting to break down film and putting together a game plan. But we're excited about still playing. Q. Mary Wise has stood the test of time down there. Do you know her well? Does she have a style that you're familiar with? What do you know about her and her history and the teams she's produced? COACH SHEFFIELD: She's had -- there are not too many people that have had more success than she has. She's been doing it year-in and year-out for more than 20 years. That's something that you admire as the people that are great consistently. There are so many people that have just kind of been here one, two, three years or something, but there are few coaches in any sport that can keep their teams up toward the top every season. She's one of them. She's somebody since early on in my career she's one of those few coaches that you study and see how they go about things. So the respect runs really, really deep for her. Strangely enough, this is the first time I've ever had one of my teams go up against them. So you know that you're going to be -- she does an unbelievable job recruiting. She gets very big, very physical, extremely athletic players that play very high above the net. This team is probably right up there towards the top in the types of teams that she's had over the years that are physical and high-flying. This one's right up there. Q. If you guys end up playing Texas again, how do you prepare your team not just for the talent that they have but for the added factor of you beat them in the national semifinals two years ago and they're probably going to be extra ramped up for that? COACH SHEFFIELD: Yeah, there are probably about 80% of the two rosters that were still in high school when that match happened. So I'm not sure -- I don't know. I think that's a non-factor. That was a big match for us two years ago. It was an important match for our program. But we've played whatever, 70 matches since then to now against some really good teams. Beating Minnesota last year twice was really big for our program, and they got us twice this year. I mean, just one example. We see so many teams that are that caliber between then and now that that match really has nothing to do with the majority of our team. 60% of our team wasn't even here last year, so I don't even know what it was. Probably 80% of our team wasn't around two years ago. But I've watched very, very little of them. Almost all of our attention has been on Florida. Those two teams are very similar from an athletic standpoint. UCLA, I caught a little bit of their match on Saturday, and I don't think I've seen a better defensive team than what I was witnessing that last part of that Michigan match. It's going to be a heck of a weekend. Q. You talked a lot about your opponents so far today. Your team is playing pretty well in its own right. Where are you happiest in how your team is playing? COACH SHEFFIELD: We played against two very different styles this past weekend. The amount of stress that both teams put on you defensively in ball control was very, very high. I think the thing that I'm happiest about with our group is just we've really grown into a really, really tough team. I thought defensively we were great. I thought we were great both matches for long stretches of time, and that's something we've really talked about is can we stretch out our time of being good. I thought we were good for really long stretches. We bounced back after errors really well. I thought we had the mindset that you want to have for each of those matches. But I would say twofold, I think defensively we were really good. We got great touches against Oregon. We didn't get a lot of stuff blocked against them, but we got positive touches and ran down the back court. I thought our back court was fantastic against Iowa State. So I would say defensively really impressed with, really proud of, the direction that we're heading. And probably just mentality. I think we're starting to round into being a team that has the mentality that I think all the elite teams have, and I think we're starting to get that. Q. Your players, after you got through the second round talked about the mantra of being 1% better every single day. How have you gotten better as a coach from the start of the season? COACH SHEFFIELD: How have I gotten better? I don't know. I don't get asked that question very much. So you've got me stumbling here. I don't know. You get better at learning your players. This was a really, really hard season. The first part of it was really hard, and it was hard on everybody. But I don't think that scared anybody. The learning process is a lot of fun. It's a joy. Everybody kind of when you're losing a few everybody wants to sit there and say, hey, keep your head up. And it's just to all coaches it's probably because you don't know what else to say. But the learning process is something that's really, really fun. So when somebody's not getting it and they start getting it, and you see them start believing a little more, that is a process that's fun to be a part of. With 60% of this team new, we're really young, we've got one senior. I think you get a lot better as a coaching staff of realizing what individuals, how they respond in certain situations. The first part of the season, we'll try a lot of different things with different kids and then sit back and watch how they respond. We might jump on somebody. We might give them a lot of praise. We might give them information. We might put some barriers up there at different times. Then we'll say, all right, how did they respond to this? Then they'll take mental notes going into the season. And hopefully if you're doing things the right way, you know how to go about things when it really, really matters at the end. So probably the biggest thing we've learned is how to communicate and work with each individual. Q. Has there been a light bulb moment this year in terms of confidence when you looked at your team and realized they believe they can beat anybody? And if so, when was that? Is? COACH SHEFFIELD: That's a funny question, because we've got players on our team that they, themselves, absolutely believe they're going to win no matter what. And I think that is an all the time thing. But when you're asking about do you have confidence in your team of being able to mesh and play well together, that's six people in a very small area. So the communication and being able to know who has what ball in the seams and things, that takes some time and some trust. So individually, I think we have players that have known, they feel like they're going to win every time. But when that trust in the team of like, all right. I know when I'm going into this battle, I don't know or this competition, that everybody else is in the fight with me and probably early on in the year we had some players that were looking around back behind and saying, hey, are you with me right now? That doesn't happen now. That hasn't happened in a while. I would say probably around those we didn't have everybody in that first week, Penn State and Ohio State. Just we had certain players that didn't know how hard they had to work. Once we were coming around that Minnesota time, even though we lost both of those matches, we started really pulling in a lot tighter as a team. You could really see some growth in the gym. Even though we lost both those matches, I was feeling pretty good about where we were headed about that time. I don't think it was a light bulb moment, it was just players working. A Lauryn Gillis coming up to Brittany and saying, I want to spend more time in the gym just you and me. And those two would go in there and Gilly would have her head set on with her music, I don't think there was any coaching going on. It was just a coach and a player just repping things out. You get confidence when you work. When things go tough, there are some people that will run the other way and hide. They won't even look at the mailbox when the bills come, and there are other people that are not afraid of things being tough. They'll go and rep it out, work it out. We've got players, Gilly being one of them, that want to rep it out, and you get confidence from that. Q. How much is going through the rigors of the Big Ten going to help you out in this mini four-team tournament this weekend? COACH SHEFFIELD: I think it's huge. I mean, these are two -- the two teams that you just played were, I mean, those were really, really good teams, and the three teams that are at there this this, these are three elite, elite teams, elite, elite programs. Fortunately, our conference is peppered with those. I don't think anybody has -- I don't think anybody in the country has played more top 50 teams than we have this year. I think we've played the most. Maybe us and one other program. So it's not going to be a shock the level of competition that we're playing this week. It's not going to be a shock to anybody on our team. Now the thing is do you go out there and execute in that situation? But I think the Big Ten, I don't think anything prepares you better than that league. Q. To listen to you all season long you've seemed like someone who puts toughness above everything else in terms of how your team plays. Is there a game plan for cultivating that view? Do you have a specific way of doing that or is it a different approach every week and different approach with every player? One would think that's the case, but is that how you go about your business? COACH SHEFFIELD: I think it's toughness, but it's also passion and enthusiasm for what you're doing. Trust, I think trust is massive. That's why we communicate with everybody, not just the coaches, but when we're talking players to players, let's cut the BS and everything else. Let's deal with the truth so you're not wasting all this energy on, they said this, but are they thinking this? And I think that's really, really critical. If you've got a high level of trust, then you can kind of move forward. But, yeah, certainly toughness, I've never seen a team in any sport that was elite that was soft. So I think that's really big. How do we cultivate that? I think you cultivate it with a consistency in how you go about things every single day. There is nothing that we're doing in our gym that's magical by any means. I think the thing that we try to do is every day we think as coaches we need to approach the gym the exact same way every single day. It doesn't matter if it's preseason or where we're at now, middle of October. Then you just have a standard and we talk about that standard. Here we are, everybody's pretty fired up. We're heading into the Sweet 16, that's pretty cool. You would think everybody's going to want to be in the gym and coaches are happy, everybody's happy. But you walk into practice today and there are people that have left their enthusiasm down in the locker room or their efforts to go after balls instead of safety last on defense and they start thinking safety first on defense, and we're going to have some issues. I think it's that standard every single day that I think builds confidence and it builds that toughness that you said. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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