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NCAA WOMEN'S 1ST AND 2ND ROUNDS: AUSTINMarch 18, 2016Jeff JudkinsKylie MaedaLexi RydalchAustin, Texas COACH JUDKINS: First of all, we're very excited to be in the NCAA tournament. It's a great honor to be able to work hard and be able to get there, and also to be able to play a great opponent, Missouri. They had a great season, probably played one of the hardest conferences. We're excited to play them, and I think also, to be here in Austin, Texas, this is a great basketball city and played great games here. I know my team is ready. We've had a long wait after that loss in the Tournament to get going, and I think we're excited to play in this tournament. And I'm really happy for these two seniors, especially, because this is their senior year, and to be able to go to the NCAA Tournament and be able to have this opportunity is really great for them. Well deserved, they both worked very hard in their career to be able to get there. Q. Lexi, what do you remember from last year's tournament? You guys weren't equipped to play that style. LEXI RYDALCH: Yeah, last year was very physical, very intense, and I think we learned from that and have learned that we need to be more prepared in the NCAA Tournament. It's more intense, more physical, and so we need to learn from that experience and be ready for this game. Q. You've been able to be in the tournament for several years. How much fun is it to be here, to be able to top it off with a 7-seed? Just talk about the experience and how much you're looking forward. LEXI RYDALCH: It's awesome. It's really exciting, especially for Kylie and I, our senior year, it's something that we set out to do since the start of summer workouts, weight lifting, running springs, everything, all the hard work. It's really exciting to see it all pay off and to get this awesome opportunity. Q. You were able to make a deep run into the tournament a few years ago. How is this team similar to that and maybe different? How have you improved over last year? LEXI RYDALCH: I think we are similar to the Sweet 16 team in that we have experience, and we have senior leadership. I think we had that the Sweet 16 year. And also, I think hopefully our schedule that we played, our tough schedule this year, we can see that in ourselves and we can be here and take confidence in the fact that we had good wins and played well under pressure. So hopefully that will prepare us for this tournament. Q. Kylie, how big will, basically, cutting down on turnovers and just taking care of the ball be against Missouri tomorrow? KYLIE MAEDA: Yeah, once you get to the NCAA Tournament, every possession matters. We learned that in the West Coast Conference tournament, that we just need to take care of the ball and get shots to the basket. That's really important to our team. Q. A lot of people have talked about your legacy as all-time leading scorer and all that. What's Kylie going to be remembered for her career? LEXI RYDALCH: I have absolutely loved playing with Kylie my whole career. People don't realize how steady she is and how insistent she is every single game, and I think her legacy is going to be her leadership, her consistency and her great shooting. She's done a lot of things that people take for granted, and she's been a huge part in our success. Q. She's talked a lot about coming from Hawai'i in the first year and how rough it was, do you have any anecdotes of what its with a like for her? Did she lean on you at all? LEXI RYDALCH: I mean, I have no idea how that experience was because I grew up in Mapleton. But I think, I don't know, she talked about how she chose BYU because of the team and how she loved how close we are and how it kind of feels like a family. I think that's really important to build good relationships and good chemistry. Q. The game against San Francisco, how much of a motivating factor is that for you guys and how ready are you to get back out on the court? KYLIE MAEDA: Yeah, I think we're really ready. Just waiting to get back -- it's been almost two weeks maybe, but we've just been focussed in practice, just working on our principles. I think we kind of went away defensive principles in the tournament, and that's something that's gotten us to this point. So we wanted to refocus on that and get ready for this tournament. Q. Not basketball related, but wondering if Coach has talked about giving you any free time to kind of go explore downtown and see what's going on? LEXI RYDALCH: Hopefully, we'd love that. Coach Judkins is great about not just letting us sit in the hotel. He usually tries to let us experience things. I don't know what the plan is for this. I mean, this is kind of a business trip for the NCAA, but we'll see what he has in mind. Q. Can you assess just what Kylie's role has been and her journey at BYU these past four years? COACH JUDKINS: I think the biggest thing that people don't realize is that Kylie is a coach on the floor and she's going to be missed next year. I mean, everybody thinks Lexi is going to be the big one, 24 points a game, yeah. But we're going to miss having her leadership, and what she did and what she does to this team. She settles everybody and she makes big shots when you need to. She makes big plays. She, on and off the court, is one of those players that you just need. People don't realize, I didn't even know she was homesick her freshman year until the end of the year. And what a great career she's had here at BYU. When I recruited her, I never thought she would do as well as she's done. She started for me for three years. I thought she would maybe start a couple years for me. She's been a fun player to coach and I'm going to miss her. I'm going to miss her in a lot of ways. I'm real happy for her because this is her reward. Her reward is to go to the NCAA Tournament and the dance, because she doesn't shoot the ball as much as everybody else, and so winning is really what it's all about for her. Q. Looking back to last year's loss against Louisville, what did you learn as a coach as far as preparing your team for that? COACH JUDKINS: Well, you know, we didn't think Louisville was going to press us the whole game and being real physical like that. The year before, we didn't really see that that much. Wasn't that my team wasn't prepared. They just didn't see it. Now we have kind of looked at it and I've kind of set it down that, hey, this game is going to be a little bit more physical, which is fine with us, that's how we practice. It's hard. Our conference, the referees don't let us be coach as physical as we can in the tournament and we have to adjust for that. I mean, Lexi already did, we've talked about it and trust it more, and hopefully we'll be ready for that. Q. What do you see from Missouri? What are the keys to playing? COACH JUDKINS: Missouri is a very, very good outside shooting team. They have three proven players that can shoot the three anywhere, NBA three. They execute a lot of plays. They run a lot of different specs where they get you off-balance. Their inside presence is a lot better than people give them credit for. They don't get as many shots maybe as some but they are very solid. They are young, but they are hungry. This is the first time they have been in the tournament for awhile, and you can just tell, their team, the way they started this year and the way they played, I really believed they were in probably the hardest conference in the country. I think that proved it with 18 teams going to the tournament. I just think they are in a great conference. And so playing us is not going to be like, oh, they are worried about playing BYU. It will be a great match-up. I think we play very similar, and I think the way that we both coach is very similar, so it should be a great game. Q. The first round matchup might be physical; how nice is it to have somebody like Lexi who is pretty fearless out there? COACH JUDKINS: She's, and that's the advantage we might have, Lexi's been in the NCAA Tournament for a few games and I think that will really help her. Sometimes the mind controls a lot of things, and as we saw a little bit in the tournament, the last game when we kind of got -- didn't execute and do what we needed to do. And that's what we have to really focus on in this tournament is: Play together, do the things that we do best, play our game, execute, and go out there and take it. Don't think it's going to happen. Go out and be aggressive. That's something that we really stress in this whole league. Q. Get Lexi talked about the music festival. What is the itinerary? What are some of the plans? COACH JUDKINS: I'm a coach that I don't like my players sitting in the hotel room all the time and doing nothing. When we went to Hawai'i, we went to the shark tank, went and saw sharks. When we go to New York, we go to a play. We go to Disneyland when we're in California. I mean, I want my girls to experience this town, so, yeah, we're going to do something. We've got to practice early today. We'll go back, we've watched a lot of Missouri, so it's about as much as I can really -- we're going to go out as a team and see Austin and let these girls experience this town and the excitement of making the NCAA tournament. But I've done that all the time. It's not like I'm doing something special. We do it all the time, and my girls are used to it. You can tell in their answer, well, he'll have something figured out. Yeah, I will. That's why we've been successful I think a lot on the road is that my girls enjoy being together and enjoy doing things, and that's how I want it to be. I coached with Coach Majerus, and he was the opposite and he stayed in the hotel room the whole time, and I believed -- yeah, I'm going to be a little bit different. When I played the NBA, I didn't sit in the hotel room on game days. I went and did some sightseeing -- indiscernible -- and we're going to do something like that. Q. Saying this game is going to be more physical, how do you actually prepare a team for that? Do you run them through any particular drills, tackling dummies or rebounds or anything? COACH JUDKINS: It's hard. We have practice plays -- I told them this week -- and they did. A lot of it's mental. It's not so much physical. It's the mental part of it, and I think it starts with these two, how they react to that. If they pressure us, how will Kylie react to that pressure and how will Lexi react when they try to make her speed up. If those two can handle it, then it kind of trickles down to the team and the team will be able to do it. Q. Being able to secure tournament bids for several seasons in a row, what does that say for the program and how important is that? COACH JUDKINS: Well, I think hopefully it means that we're good coaches and we recruit the right players that fit in our system. There's no question that player (ph) are the most important thing in any program. You can't make chicken salad without chicken. I think we've recruited the right kids, and a lot of kids have to wait their turn, and that's hard. They all want to come in and play, and a lot of freshmen -- have to wait your turn and learn the system and learn what's going on. And then you expect them to just gradually get better and they will take -- when Lexi graduates, we've got somebody hopefully in the wings waiting to take her spot. But I've had great coaches that have worked hard, assistant coaches that have sacrificed to win. You know, all four teams that are here today in this tournament playing here, they all sacrificed something. They stayed late nights watching a kid, they had to call, had to e-mail, instead of one time to a player, maybe hundreds of times. You had to watch a lot of film. You have a lot of endless nights, like the other night when we lost in San Francisco. I didn't sleep very good. It's hard. You have to make your team realize that winning is important. Losing can be (indiscernible) I want my team to know we lose and we're not happy about it and then we move on, and that's what we try to do at BYU. I have a lot of great support. My administrative facilities and all those things we have to really be able to -- I've been very blessed. Q. When you go back to the physical part and the SEC is known as a physical team, but with the rule changes, and the officials really focused on taking away that physicality to make it a more high-scoring game, what is the physical part that you're anticipating? If the officials hold true, where does the difference in physicality come between the West Coast Conference and the SEC? COACH JUDKINS: I would say the biggest difference is speed. I think you're right, they are not going to be able to hand check, physically push us around. And to tell you the truth, if they did, Lexi would like that. She likes that anyway. I think it's just the speed, the quickness of it. Sometimes that will get you a little bit off. I think sometimes just not knowing, kind of like a dear in the headlights. Last year I thought we came out, did well in the first five minutes and all of a sudden, like we just kind of lost our focus and that's part of it. We've played -- we've played a tough schedule, that was part of it, was we played better teams and a better conference to get us ready for this, and we played Texas A&M, and they are very athletic and I think they helped us, and hopefully that will help us tomorrow. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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