	products recent interviews FastScripts archive about ASAP Sports

Our Clients:

Browse by Sport

Find us on

Subscribe to RSS

Click to go to
Asaptext.com

View our
e-Brochure

NCAA WOMEN'S REGIONAL SEMIFINALS AND FINALS: LEXINGTON

March 25, 2017

Lexington, Kentucky

THE MODERATOR: We're joined at the podium by head coach Muffet McGraw and student-athletes Lindsay Allen, Erin Boley, Arike Ogunbowale, Marina Mabrey, and Kathryn Westbeld.

We'll open it up for questions for student-athletes.

Q. For Arike, when you look back on last night's game, are you still kind of amazed by some of the shots you got, and by how they fell?
ARIKE OGUNBOWALE: I think it was a great game in total. I think our whole team played really well together without Brianna (Turner), and I'm just really excited to play on Sunday.

Q. Lindsay, I know coaches don't like to talk about revenge, but I wonder about the players. You know, especially since you had such a disappointing upset against Stanford last year. Obviously, the big motivation is to get to the Final Four, but how much is revenge, sheer revenge a factor in this game?
LINDSAY ALLEN: I don't see it as revenge, I don't think, because, I mean, we beat them two years ago, and they beat us last year. I guess this game could technically be a tiebreaker type of game. So I think the real motivation is to get to the Final Four and continue to play.

Q. Any of the young ladies, what do you recall about last year's game against Stanford that still sticks with you?
KATHRYN WESTBELD: I think something that really sticks out to me is the feeling in the locker room afterwards. Our seniors were heartbroken. I think for me that just kind of stuck. It's something I don't want any of our seniors to have to go through, especially Sunday. So I think that's the motivation that's sticking with me.

Q. I know each year is different, but, Lindsay, when you face a team as often as Stanford, how differently do you kind of prepare for them this time? Is it just because of the stakes, or do you just kind of rely on past experience against them?
LINDSAY ALLEN: I think it's mostly just looking at their team and their makeup and then looking at their offense and what they run. Most teams run the same kind of sets year to year, just different players in different spots. So I think just noticing who's hot at the time, who they have, who they normally go to in crunch situations, and then just kind of figuring out from there.

Q. Marina, this is almost like a home game for you in the sense that you have way more fans than Stanford has. You had a large contingent the other night. How much of a factor is that for you folks? Do you hear the crowd? Is that something you feed off of? What kind of a factor is that for you?
MARINA MABREY: We have the best fans in the country. So we always like to see them in the stands cheering for us. It definitely helps us with momentum when we score a couple baskets and they're loud and encouraging.

Q. Anyone else?
ARIKE OGUNBOWALE: I agree with her.

Q. How much time with your coach would you expect with one day to prepare, is it just a matter of refining what you put in for last night?
LINDSAY ALLEN: Yeah, I think it is. Obviously I think it's tough to go over everything that Stanford does in one day. I think with this team it's just kind of refining things, looking at mismatches we have and making sure we're exploiting those and just remembering those and having that muscle memory to continue through this game.

Q. Lindsay, when a team has a game like last night where six players were in double figures and you're able to spread it out, especially under the adverse circumstances, what does that kind of say about the team? Or what did that kind of reveal about this team that you didn't know before?
LINDSAY ALLEN: I think just overall it was a really fun game to be a part of. When we're sharing the ball and we're being unselfish, we're happy for everyone's success, and everyone's getting hype and everyone's laughing and smiling and things like that, it's just a fun game to be a part of. It's just been fun over the past season to just being able to enjoy it, especially this past game.

We're playing with a ton of confidence, a ton of swagger, and just trying to continue that into the next game.

Q. Question for Erin: You coming back last night and having a home crowd, kind of the same homecoming theme, how much of a release was it for you to have that kind of game and kind of get that whole thing behind you and just look at it as just another game?
ERIN BOLEY: I don't know if I would say it was a relief, but like Lindsay said, it was a fun game to be a part of. Now I'm just focused on the game for Sunday. I think it's the same kind of mindset going in tomorrow as we had yesterday.

Q. Lindsay, for those of us who haven't seen a lot of your games this year, how interesting is it to have a 5'8" player that you're throwing lobs to down low, somebody who's so strong as Arike? It seems to me that she's an extremely unusual player. What is it like from your vantage point to watch her in action?
LINDSAY ALLEN: Watching Arike play is just like -- I mean, it's always a fun experience. Sometimes I just get caught watching her when I should be playing alongside her.

But she's such a unique player because she's so strong, and just able to kind of bully people down low, but also she's super quick with the ball, and she's able to slash and find the driving lane and can also shoot the three.

She's worked on her game so hard and so long this past summer. So you see what she did this past summer. I think playing with her is a lot of fun because you get that energy from her, you get that swagger and that confidence from her, and it's just really infectious and it kind of just spreads throughout the whole team.

Q. Last night was the most minutes you played in a long time. How's the ankle today?
KATHRYN WESTBELD: Not too bad. I've got to do a little work, but it feels pretty good right now.

Q. Arike, with the kind of game you all had last night, now is the kind of thing where there's no defined go-to player as it might have looked with Brianna. Now all of you have to be accounted for in some way.
ARIKE OGUNBOWALE: I think we all just need to step up, which we did, and we all have amazing players. The freshmen were both national players of the year and we have a lot of McDonald's All-American players. I think we just work well as a team, and we all bring individual traits that will help this team be successful, and it showed last night.

THE MODERATOR: Any other questions for the student-athletes? If not, then they can be dismissed. Thank you very much.

Q. Coach, do you like matching wits with Tara (VanDerveer)?
MUFFET McGRAW: She's a phenomenal coach. Definitely a Hall of Fame coach who always gets the best out of her teams. She is just incredibly smart, which makes her teams really smart.

It's not a really fun game to play. I always look at teams that are just well coached and really smart. They're very, very difficult to beat.

Q. Muffet, what is the specific challenge of playing this Stanford team? Obviously, this is the post-Ogwumike era for them, but they have a lot of weapons now, and they play great defense. I was just wondering, from your standpoint, what do you see in this particular team that may be different from previous Stanford teams?
MUFFET McGRAW: I think experience and poise. They definitely scored the ball a lot better than they did last year, but just their game experience, they never get rattled, never lose their poise. They have a lot of different weapons, a lot of different people that can hurt you. Everybody plays their role exactly. Nobody tries to do too much. So they're a really tough matchup for us.

Q. Coach, in terms of what your program has done over the last eight, nine, ten years and the ability to kind of maintain the standard class after class, could that have happened without the National Championship in 2001? Even though it was a different era, did you need that building block for this current era?
MUFFET McGRAW: You know, I think it helped me a little bit, just knowing that we were capable of getting there. But I really think Skylar (Diggins) did so much to change the culture of our program when she came in. She just set a new tone and changed things, changed -- really brought the level up in terms of practicing. We were able to carry it on after she left. That was probably her biggest legacy for us.

Q. Coach, I know you try not to look too far down the road, not past the next game, in fact, but when this bracket was set up and you saw that Stanford was in it, did the thought cross your mind, oh, no, we've got to go through them again possibly. Did that kind of prepare you for this moment?
MUFFET McGRAW: You know, I think the first look at the bracket actually came when the three were revealed and we hadn't been up yet, and my first thought was Ohio State is going to be in our bracket. Then we started thinking, uh-oh, we got Texas. We got Stanford. That's a tough four teams we're going to have to eventually play.

So, you know, I think it was good to look at it that way, but without Bri, it kind of changes things a little bit for us. But it was an opportunity for us to look at what we did last year and to see if we could take one more step.

Q. Muffet, the players kind of downplayed the revenge factor, and I was kind of curious to hear what your point of view is on that. Is it the rubber game of a three-game set? Or are you itching to pay them back for last year?
MUFFET McGRAW: I think whenever you lose a game during the year, you lose a game, you want to play that team again. When it's the last game of the season, you don't get a chance to do that again. I think we know what we're up against, we know how good they are.

I won't say we look forward to it because we know it's going to be a tough matchup.

Q. Do you recruit many players -- do you and Stanford go after the same players a lot?
MUFFET McGRAW: All the time. Yes, we have very similar things we look for in players, and we constantly recruit against them.

Q. Which brings me to the other question, though: You've only played twice in the regular season. Why is that? Your football teams play each other every year. You've got two schools that are high-caliber basketball with big academic reputations. Why don't you play each other in the regular season?
MUFFET McGRAW: You know, we've talked about playing. The biggest thing, we don't have any kids from the West Coast generally. When we set our schedule, we like to go home so players can play in front of their home crowds. We're not really recruiting a lot in California right now. If that changes, I think that's a reason to go out there.

We had been playing USC and UCLA. We'd been going out with football. When USC played, we'd go out and play the night before. So it was kind of a rivalry game.

But it's something, I think we would look to explore, but you travel so much being in the ACC, it's not exactly a great footprint for us. So we try not to travel too much outside of the conference season if we can.

Q. You were talking last night how proud you were of the underclassmen and how they kind of came together. Maybe you'd seen this kind of coming along, but for them to step up in a game like that without your top player, what, in retrospect, did that reveal about these guys?
MUFFET McGRAW: I don't think I really envisioned the game going like it did, as well as it did. I knew that Arike would be terrific because that's the kind of player she was in high school. She's really sacrificed a lot to get the ball to Bri.

I knew Marina was capable. So I think it was an opportunity for them to showcase what they could do while still playing team basketball and still having a lot of assists.

I think it showed we are a team that's hard to guard. We are a team that you have to respect everyone on the floor, which makes us really hard to guard. I think it opens up different things for us in the offense that we didn't get. Obviously, it took away a lot of things that we normally get, but we're playing a little different right now, and I think it's kind of a free, loose, fun type of game.

THE MODERATOR: Any other questions for the head coach? Thank you very much.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

ASAP Sports, Inc. | T: 1.212 385 0297