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ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT

March 6, 2019

Greensboro, North Carolina

Virginia Tech - 85, Wake Forest - 63

THE MODERATOR: Next to me on the left is Coach Jen Hoover, Alex Sharp and Gina Conti. Coach, an opening statement.

COACH HOOVER: Disappointed in the outcome, obviously. I think we give a lot of credit to Virginia Tech. I thought they came out on a mission, and it was obvious in the first half. We had a lot of missed assignments. It took us a while, I thought, to kind of fix it.

And anytime you've got two kids getting 10-plus rebounds in a game that's kind of denomination on the board. It's hard for us to win games if we're not going to outrebound our opponents.

THE MODERATOR: Questions?

Q. Jen, where did you feel like that one was slipping away in the first quarter? I think they went on a 20-2 run.
COACH HOOVER: I thought defensively we struggled. We just did. They're a tough team to guard anyway because they move the ball so well. They've got a combination inside/outside. Magarity is a tough matchup for anybody because she can play inside and outside. And I thought we had a lot of missed assignments. They hit a lot of shots and they drove the ball hard at us and we had a lot of fouls.

Anytime you're not scoring on one end and you're giving that up, it just becomes a grind. And we really just couldn't withstand it or stop the bleeding, if you would. So I felt that happened pretty early in the first.

I know we started off okay. It was going back and forth a little bit. But once they hit a couple they were able to get momentum and we weren't able to take that momentum back.

Q. Alex, Sunday you guys were leading that team at the half. What was so different about tonight?
ALEX SHARP: I think Sunday we were more locked into our game plan. Today we didn't execute on our game plan. A big part of that was defense. And our goal was to communicate better than what we did Sunday because we thought that would really give us an edge and push us over the edge to beat them but we didn't do that. So I think that was a big difference.

Q. Jen, obviously disappointing finish to the season. You guys had a ton of adversity. When does the page get turned and you start working on next year?
COACH HOOVER: I told them in the locker room everybody that played out there tonight is back. And that's the encouraging thing for next year. The things that this team's faced this year, it's been a tough year. It's been a tough year not only for our players but a tough year on me and our staff.

Every time we turned around, we lost somebody else. And we were playing freshmen and sophomores. And the one junior, Alex, misses a six-week period in there. So we've only had her back for a couple of weeks.

And you're playing against a team like Virginia Tech that's two leaders are seniors, Magarity and Emery. And I think there's a big difference on the court, especially in a crunch-time situation with that experience and that leadership and that ownership there. But we turned it. We've turned it for probably the last four, five games. And we've been playing with kids that all will be returning.

So I'm excited about that. These kids never gave up. They believed. They kept giving me everything they've got every day.

And sometimes it just wasn't enough. And we ran out of gas a lot of times. So we're excited. We've got some new pieces coming in and we really think will help us. And these pieces will continue to know how this felt and know that Wake doesn't lose on the first day of the ACC tournament ever.

Q. Is this maybe your toughest year of playing basketball ever? Is that -- can you quantify it that way?
GINA CONTI: I would say this year has been pretty tough. But I mean I feel like I've been prepared with practices -- the coaches and my teammates have prepared me for, like, game situations. So with going to Italy and getting a head start in the year having ten extra practices, I felt prepared, yeah, I'd say it's been okay.

Q. How difficult is it to be in a game like this and look down at the end of the bench and there's Elisa who hasn't played in a month or so and Ariel hasn't played all year and just knowing what the team could have looked like versus what it did end up looking like?
COACH HOOVER: In the last month or so, this may sound bad, I've ignored them. I've had to because you can't think about what would have been because the rest of the kids were pouring their hearts out for us and every day coming in and finding a way to get better, a way to step up, a way to rebound a little bit more here.

It was just a situation where we were really focused in on the kids that we knew we were going to play night in, night out. And I think that was important for this group to know that we couldn't think about what if, what if, what if. It just wasn't that. And this group never did that. They never thought, oh, woe is us; we're so hurt, so injured, I never heard it out of them ever. It was like, Coach, what's next? And Alex, I'm going to play you at the 4. She'd give me bright eyes, okay, and she'd do it, like it wasn't, well, I don't play the 4.

So I think kudos to this team and these players because they gutted that out and we just tried to continue to keep focused on the ones we had and the ones we knew would be in there in the fight each night.

THE MODERATOR: Thank you.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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