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WOMEN'S NATIONAL INVITATION TOURNAMENTMarch 23, 2017JR PayneHaley SmithIowa City, Iowa Iowa - 80, Colorado - 62 JR PAYNE: I would like to thank the people of Iowa, the University of Iowa. Every single person we've come into contact with in this arena over the last two days has been unbelievably welcoming, respectful of our coaching staff, our players, and we really appreciate the way we've been treated by everyone here, and just congratulations to Coach. That's an incredible number of wins, and their team played unbelievably hard and a great effort. I'm very proud of our team tonight, as well. The outcome certainly wasn't what we wanted, but I'm very proud of our effort and our tenacity, our willingness. We're shorthanded, or whatever the circumstances are, our team never quit against a very, very good Iowa team, and I think that's to be commended, not just for Haley, one of our star seniors, but our entire team. Q. Gustafson obviously had a huge game in the previous round. Did you really try to focus on slowing her down, and did that kind of open things up? JR PAYNE: I don't know what opened things up on the perimeter, but they were certainly open, that's for sure. But no, you can see the numbers. Megan is a great interior player, and yeah, there was a focus on being able to contain her. We didn't expect to stop her, but working to contain her, and obviously that opened up the shooters more. Q. It seemed like Iowa made two big runs in the first and second quarters, and at first they were able to get to the basket, penetrate real easily, and then all of a sudden the threes came. Was that sort of a result of the penetration do you think? JR PAYNE: Honestly, they were fantastic, and it seemed like everything they tried to do offensively -- I thought we were not particularly good defensively because we were giving up penetration and we were losing shooters. I think the combination of them playing really, really well and us not playing well defensively made things open up like that. Q. Haley, you did talk in the locker room about overachieving; can you expand on that a little bit? HALEY SMITH: Yeah, after the season we had last year, I know as far as what people thought outside of the team and what we would accomplish this year, I think we did a really great job of meeting that challenge and stepping up, and I think that in the preseason, during the Pac-12 season and then going into the postseason, we'd really done well to step up and face adversity and fight and really reestablish kind of the Colorado name and the Colorado brand of basketball. Obviously, this was my last game, and I won't be playing anymore. I'm confident in where the program is being left, and I'm really happy to have had the new coaches come in, and I'm excited to see where the program goes, and I know it's only going up from here. Q. Did you feel like you guys got pretty good shots? Were they just not falling today? HALEY SMITH: I think we got some good shots. And I think things were falling for parts of the game. But we just weren't really being really aggressive throughout the whole game, at least in the first half, and not really getting to the rim. We were settling for more outside shots, which were falling, but when they're not, then we've got to make sure we get to the basket, get to the free-throw line, which we didn't do in the first half. We changed that around the second half. We just weren't being as aggressive on the offensive side. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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