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BIG TEN CONFERENCE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP

March 1, 2017

Indianapolis, Indiana

Wisconsin - 61, Rutgers - 55

THE MODERATOR: Opening comments from Coach Stringer and then we'll go to Shrita for comments.

COACH STRINGER: It's unfortunate. In a way I'm kind of glad. It's been painful this year. So we will get started next year and see if we can't do it. We'll have a whole lot better than we do this year. That's it.

Q. Obviously not the outcome you guys wanted today. But coming to the Big Ten Tournament and having this experience, what does this mean to your team, and is there anything positive that you can take away from it?
SHRITA PARKER: No, there's not really nothing positive that we can take from it because we wasn't planning on coming here and losing and going home the first night. But I can say that next year starts now and we're going to work on the things that we had a lot of problems on this year. And we have a lot of great players that will be added onto the team next year. So you'll have to see.

Q. With a couple of sophomores on your starting lineup, does the experience, is that valuable at all, just to have them in this atmosphere and at this type of event?
SHRITA PARKER: Yes, experience is always good for players that's young because they can always learn from those mistakes. So, yeah.

Q. Vivian, talk about the first half. You really struggled offensively.
COACH STRINGER: I don't know how you explain it. I mean, we're missing everything. Just we seem to be slow. Late. The cuts that were coming in front. You would think that we're playing at 12:00 at night. And the movement had everything to do with it.

And, quite frankly, we tried to start a press which we normally don't, we tried to do that because we wanted to up the energy up and step the intensity up, where at the beginning we were afraid to go into man because we have had a lot of fouls. Just not moving our feet well and we've had a lot of fouls called on us.

So that was the issue. So we thought, okay, let's step up the press, rather than, because normally it would be something we would gradually get to. But it's like now or never, we either get it done or go home as simple as that.

Probably what was most disappointing is we abandoned the importance of moving the ball and seeing each other, getting those screens and looking for the attack and instead -- let me give you an example. We're not a 3-point shooting team. We shot three for 17. Is that for real? That's crazy.

So I'm just upset about that, because we abandoned what we should have been doing and didn't see the inside.

I thought one of our people, Vickie, Vickie was scoring well. She's been scoring well the last couple of weeks, but did we see her? No. We're taking shots.

So that hurt us when offensively we're not executing. We all of a sudden decided to start taking 3s real quick. Didn't have it. And if the defense is not there and the defense wasn't there because what we were trying to do is to press them and then try to fool them, if you will, we fooled ourselves because we weren't moving the way that we should.

It's like should you just go and play one defense, whether it's a 2-3 or a 3-2 or man to man, just one, keep it simple.

I thought -- I and I still do think that we're capable of playing any one of those things that we needed to do. But I'm still at a loss just missing shots and taking the shots that didn't allow for us to see.

But I think Shrita is right: We should be a whole heck of a lot better with some experienced players, people that have been in this situation. And see, I could use that as an excuse that it's a tournament; but, honestly, I can't do that because we've been doing this all year.

We just have not demonstrated that we have the ability to settle down or that we've had control. And hopefully next year we'll be a much more controlled team and able to run as we should but also get the ball back.

It will be better. I can promise you that. It's got to be better.

Q. Pressure did speed them up in the second half, forced 22 turnovers, 20 points off those turnovers, and got you back in the game.
COACH STRINGER: Of course. But defense has always gotten us back in the game, you know what I mean? But we seem to be moving too slow at first. But now, with a sense of urgency, oh my God, there's 20 minutes left; it's now or never, we really better step it up.

And we began to move much more aggressively. We just tended to play a little too soft and I know that that's what got us in the game. If you can imagine if we can apply that kind of pressure at the beginning, but keep in mind we're working with eight players. One of the people that's sitting there can't play right now. She's redshirted. And three of those players are centers.

And so at no time would we be playing two centers. And seldom never three. And most of the time only two centers. So that meant that it puts people like Shrita, puts KK, puts Jaz and of course Aliyah picked up her five fouls. She wasn't in there anytime talking about it. So we basically had four people on the perimeter to play and five people, and we need four on the floor at any one time.

Now, if you compound that with a foul situation, which is what happened, then you start to mix and match and trying to figure out how we can run this, we can't run this because this person doesn't do that, she's playing out of position. So we've been -- it's been a mess. We've really patched things together and hopefully next year we'll have all of the positions and the depth at each position that we can take one out, put another one in, not miss the depth and keep the intensity up and not be strained with what we can do, but I just felt strained. We were strained quite a bit today.

THE MODERATOR: Thank you.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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BIG TEN CONFERENCE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP

March 1, 2017

C. Vivian Stringer

Shrita Parker