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SOUTHEASTERN CONFERENCE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENTMarch 10, 2019Mike NeighborsChelsea DungeeMalica MonkNashville, Tennessee Mississippi State-101, Arkansas-70 THE MODERATOR: We are joined by Arkansas. Coach, if you could start with an opening statement. MIKE NEIGHBORS: We said yesterday when y'all were asking about what it would take to win four games in four days, I said we'd have to have tremendous effort by our players. We got that. We'd have to have tremendous job by our athletic trainers. We got that. We had to have our strength and conditioning coach do his thing. We did that. Had a good plan. At the very end of that I said we have to hope they didn't play very well. I was honest. I'm telling you, they just played great. We had no answer. We were drawing stuff in the dirt literally trying to figure it out. They're just really, really hard to guard, especially when they play like they did, shoot it like they did on the perimeter. They got our best effort, but I feel like we got their best effort, too. THE MODERATOR: Questions for the student-athletes. Q. Malica, you kind of have been with this team for a long time. This is disappointing. How does it feel to finish largely the way the team did? MALICA MONK: I wouldn't necessarily say it's a disappointment. It's actually a goal achievement. Even though we didn't win, nobody expected us to come out this far. I just feel like it's a really great experience to be out here competing with the best and able to compete with my teammates, get as far as we did. That's the best group of girls I have played basketball with. I'm hoping and praying we make it to the tournament so we can continue what we're doing. Q. What do you feel about the state of the program going forward? MALICA MONK: We are headed in a great direction. As long as you have Coach Neighbors on the coaching staff, there's no doubt this program is going to excel up. Q. Chelsea, bittersweet? Reflect on the experience. CHELSEA DUNGEE: I'm proud of our team. I'm proud of the senior class. They've led this team from the get-go. I'm so thankful these guys accepted me. We played great. I'm thankful you guys believed in me, I'm thankful for the coaching staff, I'm thankful for Coach Neighbors for believing in me. This is a great group of girls to be a part of and a great team. Q. Chelsea, your points is an SEC record. What does that mean to you? CHELSEA DUNGEE: It means a lot. I'm really excited and really happy. I've worked really hard behind closed doors. Just to see goals like that accomplished, I'm thankful for my teammates. They're just as responsible for helping me get to that goal as I am. I'm just thankful for them. THE MODERATOR: Thank you, ladies. We'll continue with questions for coach. Q. Can you elaborate on what type of matchup problems McCowan caused for you today? MIKE NEIGHBORS: You can't prepare for it. If Gafford would have flew down here with us... I'm telling you, at our place, when we played them, Gafford walked by her, he looked at her, Do you think you can guard her? Maybe not. I don't think there's a way to guard her if they shoot it the way they shot it. She's so good at using the airtime of the past to seal your position. You can't move her. She's going to move you four to six feet every time she touches you. She's an impossible matchup for 95% of the college basketball teams out there. We tried everything. Like I said, we were literally drawing stuff up in the dirt to try to stop her. She had four points in the second half or six. That just opened it up for the shooters to have what they did all the way down to the buzzer. Q. Monday, Tuesday, did you see any of this coming? How does what happened this weekend change the narrative of your program? MIKE NEIGHBORS: We were talking an awful loft about the NIT. I think now you change that completely to NCAA talk. That's what the SEC is about. That's why you play in this league. If you can do what we did... Now we have three wins over top 25 teams. We didn't have that before. Now we do. Last Friday I actually sat in for Cam Newbauer on the NCAA conference call because he was having to play. I justifiably so, we didn't talk about Arkansas, but no problem with that then. I wouldn't if that happened again this Monday. I think our résumé stacks up as well as a lot of the teams being talked about. I followed it intently for 15 years. I hadn't even got a folder out yet for this year until now. When I get home, it will be one of the first things I'll do. We're a 20-win SEC team, won nine games within our league. We beat teams that are certainly already in the field. The narrative is going to change a lot. I haven't put a tweet out in about three months for a reason. I've been saving it. Get ready. Q. You mentioned how well they shot the basketball today. Coach Schaefer remarked yesterday when they played through Teaira, that opens up things. If they make it, bonus. How have you seen them evolve offensively, playing through her more? MIKE NEIGHBORS: They have. But I think you can run about any offense. She is a piece that you build around, and they have. They went out and got kids that make shots. Hunter from UConn. Danberry from Arkansas. People like that. They surrounded her with pieces. A great point guard like Jazzmun Holmes. When she gets the stats sheets, she's looking for the A and the TO, not the points and rebounds. He's built a tremendous program. I was lucky enough to go down there and spend time with him three years ago. When I was at Washington, we talked a lot about offense, tried to learn some defense. They are incredibly good on both ends of the floor. It's why they are as good as they are. 70 points against those guys with only 12 turnovers feels like an 'atta'boy'. You look up, you got beat by 31. That's how good they are. He's got them completely focused. They were playing down to the buzzer like it was a two-point game. That's hard to instill in kids. It's tough to play against. I know that's what they're trying to do with their team. We'll get to that point someday. Q. Can you reflect on the performance by Chelsea Dungee breaking the record this week in the tournament. MIKE NEIGHBORS: Yeah, I think her performance is who she's always been in her life. Now that she's here where she's surrounded by a group of people on and off the court, she's had a chance to really become a great teammate and grow up as a teammate. Now her game is getting ready to go to another level, too. This is just scratching the surface of what this kid can do. She talked about working behind the scenes. I'll elaborate a little bit on that. She completely changed her off-the-court regime with rest and diet and exercise, focus in the classroom. As a result, she's able to play at this level. She's only been like that for about six months. Wait till she's been like that for a year and six months. We have some pieces coming, even though we're graduating a great class, we have some pieces coming in that will build and start to look a little bit more like teams at the top of our league. She is a kid who really, really takes a lot of pride in her team's success. She wants to win as much as anybody. I think that's going to be the biggest difference you see in her next year. Q. How do you feel about the program going forward? MIKE NEIGHBORS: Excited. We had a four-year plan that we're going to have to erase I heard, talking to some people a year ahead. I'm okay with that. Jumped a few hurdles quicker. I think the number -- you kind of number it by the number of text messages you get after losses. The wins, you're going to get everybody. I had about 600 of them. That's a good sign. We're going to do some home visits next week while we're sitting around. We have every resource we need at the University of Arkansas to do it and get to the top of the league. Mississippi State is a perfect example of that. Five or 10 years ago, this was a team playing early in the week, going home early in the week. Now they've been here four or five straight years. They're somebody we can look at. I think we've got a lot of those boxes checked already. We'll go to work checking a few more this summer. Q. The amount of minutes that your starters played, do you think today was a sign of fatigue? MIKE NEIGHBORS: We've never worked on four games in four days. I think it was certainly a factor. But, no. The big answer is no. We start taking the load off their legs all the way back into December. I guarantee you if we checked our load on our legs, it's about the same as what we've had in a normal week. We didn't take our shoot, gave them extra rest. I think the mental fatigue. It's that mental grind. We were all at the hotel yesterday. Those people know us by name at the hotel. The places we've been going to eat, they know us by name. We've been for a long time. There's a reason the top two get two byes. They make it a challenge for the 10 seed and below to play four or five games because we didn't perform as well over the course of the year. That's the hard part. The mental side of it, the up and the down, the quick turnarounds. That's why the higher seeds should get an advantage. I don't think our kids were tired. I think, if anything, they may have been a little bit mentally fatigued. Q. How proud are you of showing how tough they were, no quit? MIKE NEIGHBORS: You're exactly right. That's the gist of those 600 texts, are all about people being proud of the fight, the way we did it. All the way down to the buzzer, every single day, coming back from a huge deficit yesterday, bouncing back with a quick turnaround against one of the teams I think should be considered for a top seed in the NCAA tournament. Very proud. It takes everybody in our staff, all the way to people that didn't even make the trip with us, to get it to that point. It's been a year-long process. We've had our ups and downs, some curves in the road. Where we're at right now in finishing, I think that's what this team will always remember about each other and what we'll be remembered for. THE MODERATOR: Thank you very much. MIKE NEIGHBORS: Thank you. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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