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BIG EAST CONFERENCE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENTMarch 6, 2016Doug BrunoMegan PodkowaJessica JanuaryChicago, Illinois DePaul - 76, Butler - 49 DOUG BRUNO: Just having your players understand the necessity of focus at this time of the year is a tribute to the leadership of my -- I'm blessed to coach these players and we have two great senior leaders. Megan, who's sitting here and Chanise and Jessica, and Brooke Schulte as juniors, as well. I think what takes place in the locker room is what really where the focus and energy to come out and play like this is all about, and I just felt we were ready to play. At this time of year you can have all kinds of excuses. Okay, you're not playing in a real -- we've been off for 11 days, for eight days and blah blah blah blah blah. We've been healthy all year, thank God, and this is the first week that we actually -- like I'll talk about it now that we've won a game. I wasn't going to talk about it before, but last week we missed three players because of sickness. We finally got sick. I'm not saying that we want to, but everybody on the campus here has been sick. Megan didn't practice last week, neither did Jacqui Grant or Chanise Jenkins. It was just nice to get through a sick game, if you will. I want to make sure that that doesn't come off as any kind of condescending remark against Butler. Butler is a really, really good basketball team and Butler is a team -- I can't talk about Butler without talking about the fact that they beat Arkansas from the Southeastern Conference, a really good team, and they beat TCU from the Big 12, and that's how good this league has gotten this year, really, really quickly. And their coaching staff, Coach Kurt and their staff is doing a great job of putting that program together. After we beat them, the last home game we played in this gym was three weeks ago against Butler, and they beat St. John's after that game. We know that they've got winnable games in their arsenal, and we wanted to make sure that it wasn't going to be against us tonight. I was really proud about our senior leadership and our junior leadership. Q. Did you notice a difference playing at McGrath this year compared to Allstate in the last couple years? MEGAN PODKOWA: Yeah, I mean, I thought the energy -- you could tell it was like the entire gym. We had a really good crowd here, so I thought the energy in the building was really fun to play in. It was a good atmosphere. JESSICA JANUARY: Yeah, I would say the same. Q. It didn't seem to me tonight that you folks had any weak spots from start to finish, pretty much dominated the game. How is that different from the last time that you played Butler? JESSICA JANUARY: Yeah, I think for this game we really wanted to focus on getting off to a really quick and efficient start, and I think we did a good job doing that in the beginning. And then we really just tried to maintain our energy throughout the whole game, and that really helped us, even though we didn't shoot very well tonight offensively and defensively. Q. Jessica, how huge was it for you and Chanise to neutralize Blaire, especially after the game she had against Xavier yesterday? JESSICA JANUARY: Yeah, just being able to watch her, she played really well yesterday, and we knew that she was a really good player as well as the other players on the team. Brooke Schulte did a really good job taking her out early in the game and just trying to limit her touches, and I think we did a good job on her. Q. Jessica, could you talk about how you complement Podkowa's game? JESSICA JANUARY: Yeah, Podkowa is a really good player. She's really versatile. She can play inside and outside, and she really is just very beneficial for her team because we can get her easy post-ups and get her easy baskets when the guards aren't shooting very well. She's also a really good passer so even when we get it into her and we cut it off for her, she can always get us the ball, or if we kick it out to her, she's knocking down shots. It's really nice to play with her. Q. You talked about earlier in the week kind of setting a tone just for potential seeding down the line. How do you feel like you came out tonight and set -- DOUG BRUNO: Well, first of all, once you get to this time of the year, it's constant one in a row and that's all it can be is one in a row. Then when you're playing one in a row, I think there's -- we're playing for one in a row for two really important reasons. The primary reason is to win the Big East championship, so we're working for one in a row three times to win the Big East championship and the automatic bid. But then there's a second one in a row. You never want to presume you're in the NCAA Tournament, but I think our résumé, specifically with the great non-conference schedule that we've played, and three of our seven losses are against Nos. 1 -- UConn, Notre Dame and Baylor, Baylor and Notre Dame being on the road -- that's three of our seven losses. I think it's pretty -- we've got a pretty good shot to be in the tournament. So now this women's basketball tournament for years had the top four seeds in each region have two home games. Then we went back to neutral sites, and now we're back to the first four teams of each region are going to host two games. And we still think we have an outside chance to host and are a No. 4 seed. I don't know if that's going to happen or not, but I don't think we have any chance of it happening without having a one in a row three-time event here in the Big East Tournament. Q. You told us after you last played Butler that you can be a very good team and a very average team. What was the key to some of the consistency tonight? DOUG BRUNO: You're talking about our team, that we can be very good when we're good -- Q. Correct. DOUG BRUNO: -- and we can be very average. I just think it's just consistent focus on the little things. The longer I do this, the more the little things just keep coming back and hitting you right smack dab in the face. I can start giving you a litany of little things that are all tech basketball stuff, and it doesn't change. It doesn't change if you're coaching an eighth grade team, a seventh grade team, an NBA team, a WNBA team. You've got to rebound, you've got to share, you've got to knock down shots, you've got to have people that are good teammates, you've got to have people that are unselfish, you've got to have people that are ultra competitive and people that work hard. And we have a great group of young women, and that's why I love coaching this team is they're just a special group of people. I'm thrilled about the awards that were earned this week, and those players all have each other's backs. There's no pettiness about anything. Every single one of them is happy for the other, and I'm thrilled that Megan did get the scholar-athlete award, I'm thrilled that Chanise did get the Player of the Year award. The all-conference awards are great, and probably -- I have a belief that the two people that were sitting right here were probably a little bit more first-team to me than second, but I'll take those coaches' votes when we got them, and I think we got a lot of good coaches' votes this week. But I'm proud of them. I brought that stuff up because it shows you how -- the class of these women that they're not petty about who got what. They care about the team and the team winning. This program's done a lot. We played in 13 straight tournaments, and this would be 14, if we can do this year. Only seven schools in the country have done that. If I don't tell you, nobody is going to tell you, so I have to tell you. I have to keep telling you because -- but of the teams that we're competing with, UConn, Notre Dame, Stanford, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Duke, we're the only one that hasn't been to the Final Four. We're the only one that hasn't won a national championship. So I think these players understand that -- they've tasted Sweet 16, but they also would like to give themselves a shot at a little bit more. But we've got to stay in the moment. And your question is about what makes us very good and what makes us very average. What the coach just did can make you very average real fast. What the coach just did talking about all that that's out there, guess what, we won't be focused tomorrow for St. John's. So I'm talking to you about what's out there, but these players have to talk about nothing -- Q. You said St. John's tonight. DOUG BRUNO: Yeah, I did. Be careful what you wish for, right? Yeah, no kidding, because both those teams are really, really talented teams. I guess the reason for wishing for St. John's is probably because they've got the higher record, and we probably want the team with the higher record, so that's probably why the Freudian slip, out there instead of right back here. So that's really what's important is they do a great job of staying in the moment, and when they stay in the moment, we're pretty good. When we get -- that's young people. That's why they're a good group. Q. You talked about staying in the moment. Towards the end of the first half, Schickel had three straight lay-ups, I believe, and ended up calling a time-out somewhere in between, and they ended up recovering towards the end of the half with Podkowa's lay-up. How huge was them for stay in the moment after that stretch? DOUG BRUNO: It was very obvious what Coach Kurt was doing, he was isolating two of our bigger kids against two of their big kids and just going out the backside and going down to the low post. We have a strategy for how we're supposed to be defending that, and we weren't doing it. But at the same time, offensively, I thought we were stagnant at the same time. I thought the ball wasn't moving, it was staying in one spot, and the ball needs to move for us to be good, and the ball wasn't moving. So that's why the time-out was both defensively and offensively, and I'm glad Megan made the play that she made. That was a nice momentum play going into the half. Q. Megan played a really selfless game tonight. How important do you think her game is going forward into this tournament and beyond? DOUG BRUNO: Well, I think it's important. What makes this team a great team is the fact that they are a team. I get tired -- whenever I hear people say that the only guy that ever held Michael Jordan to 15 points was Dean Smith, it drives me nuts. Why? Because Michael Jordan had James Worthy and Perkins on the team, so it's okay to average 15 if you've got other players that are really, really that good. How good is Megan Podkowa going forward? It's about Megan, it's about Jessica, it's about Chanise Jenkins, but it's also about people like Brooke Schulte, people like Jacqui Grant, people like Mart'e Grays had a little bounce to her step after she did some delinquent defensive faux pas tonight. But she bounced back on the offensive end. So it's about Ashton Millender, it's about Lauren Prochaska, it's about the bench, it's about Tenita Allen. Those players, that's what makes the team a really, really good team. We started the season building this program around the three pillars of Podkowa, Jenkins, and January, and as the season has gone along -- it was actually the first Butler game, the 15th of January, the first Butler game, we were still struggling. We played Butler the 15th, it was a week after we got beat by Nova right here, and that's when I quit talking about the bench. I said, you know what, the bench is going to be what the bench is going to be and they're going to emerge. Up until that time I kept talking about how the bench is going to emerge. I just quit talking about it, and they started getting better. Since that last -- really I thought played a pretty-not good game at Butler on the 15th. And since then we've bounced back pretty good, and I think we won four, lost to Seton Hall, and I think this is our ninth in a row, so it's 13 out of 14 or something since that moment. So I think these players -- it's about all of them. I'm sorry I'm answering in a long way, but it's about every single one of them. They all feed off of each other. It's nice to have one have a bad night and two pick them up but still they all have to have -- for us to go where we want to go, they all have to be really good every night. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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