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BIG 12 CONFERENCE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP

March 4, 2017

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

West Virginia - 82

Oklahoma - 580

THE MODERATOR: We're now joined by the Oklahoma Sooners, Coach Sherri Coale and her two student-athletes, Vionise Pierre-Louis and Maddie Manning. Coach, your thoughts about the game?

SHERRI COALE: I've been coaching a long time, and I don't think that I've ever had a team take the floor and appear to be as ill-prepared or as unmotivated as we appeared tonight and it's hard to understand and I'm disappointed by it. I want to publicly apologize to our fans and our administration because that was not what the University of Oklahoma deserves. It is not the way our institution should be represented. Ultimately, that's on me. It's on me and my coaching staff. We have to find a way to reach our guys emotionally and mentally to get them in a position to perform better than we did tonight.

I want to give West Virginia credit. They were fantastic. They played with great urgency. They played with great purpose. They played with great intensity, and they're a very good basketball team.

Q. Coach, is there anything you can point to as to why you came out as flat as you did?
SHERRI COALE: No, if I could figure out why then I could correct it. My coaching staff and I'll get back to work immediately and see if we can unlock the formula, solve the riddle.

Q. Sherri, even though you only scored 10 points in the opening quarter, wasn't it on defense where it was frustrating? You couldn't stop 'em tonight.
SHERRI COALE: The very first defensive position of the game we did not adhere to the scout and knew it was a problem right then. We were guarding in a panicked sort of way, nobody doing their job on weak side and that eroded trust and it went down the slippery slope really fast.

West Virginia made some plays, too, and it was like we were getting buried alive there. That's where you've got to have guys step up and remind one another, stick to the game plan, what did we prepare on today? Let's make sure we guard 'em in that way.

Q. Sherri, you talked about before the game that your team wants it so badly that sometimes that can be detrimental, maybe the will to win getting in their head. Did that play a part tonight?
SHERRI COALE: I don't know. I think you would have to ask players that. I think obviously we want to win. I think everybody out there wants to win. The more fun you have and the more you let loose the more success you have, and the more success you have the longer you get to pay. So it seems like a very logical cycle to me.

Q. From a players' perspective, did you feel that overwhelming urgency or too much that it was detrimental that you guys wanted to win too badly?
MADDIE MANNING: I don't know that it's that either. The bottom line is we're Division I basketball players. We need to perform.

Q. When you came out and it started to go wrong, did you know you weren't yourselves as quickly as Sherri mentioned, or did it feel like it was okay and then all of a sudden you are down 12-0 and it all sort of crumbles?
MADDIE MANNING: I thought we were going to get it. We missed a couple of layups and I thought they were going to go in and things were going to change, but you have to make a change and we didn't.

VIONISE PIERRE-LOUIS: It was 12-0 and we didn't have no leadership. Nobody stepped up and said, give me the ball or anything like that. It looked like we were scared out there, like Coach said, and we're Division I athletes. We need to be performing like that. We can't step on the court and it's automatically 12-0, and we have no leader stepping up. So lack of effort, lack of motivation on our part.

Q. Given what you just said, is this something the coaches can bring you out of, or is this something you guys have to have a meeting of minds amongst yourselves?
VIONISE PIERRE-LOUIS: I feel like our coaches have done enough. They can't spoon feed us every single time we have a bad game. We need to find that amongst ourselves, dig down, figure that out. We can't have that type of mentality going into the Big 12 Tournament.

Q. You guys are coming off back-to-back 20-point losses going into the tournament. How do you as a coach get your players back on track, and how do you guys as players get back on track before the tournament?
SHERRI COALE: We didn't win 22 games this year by accident. So we'll take this time in the next two weeks and find a way. If I had an exact answer for you then we wouldn't be having this conversation right now, but we will figure it out. That's what we're paid to do.

THE MODERATOR: Good luck in the NCAAs.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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