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NCAA WOMEN'S REGIONAL SEMIFINALS AND FINALS: CHICAGOMarch 30, 2019Gary BlairKayla WellsCiera JohnsonChennedy CarterChicago, Illinois Notre Dame - 87, Texas A&M - 80 GARY BLAIR: First, this is what women's basketball needed. You just saw six games that were all double-digit wins that were a little bit of a runaways. We just played arguably maybe the best team right down to the wire. We don't ever give up. We find ways to get the job done. It was a tremendous ball game. I had to call time-out two minutes into the second half. They made a couple of good plays. We made mistakes. We had our chances. That's all you can want. But folks, this is what women's basketball needs right now. They don't need the double-digit wins and all of that. We lost the ball game probably because of the paint points that they got, whether it was Arike posting up or their two bigs inside, and this is why they are better this year than they were last year, because of Turner. She changes the game, rushes shots. But the heck with them. I want to talk about these three right here, okay. I'm going to tell you one thing, all you people that are out there listening, if she doesn't make State Farm All-American this year, something is doggone wrong. Now, think about it; why does she have to wait until she becomes a junior or a senior just because there's very quality at the top? And you saw one out there tonight. But if she's earned it, and she has, and she's done it for two straight years, this is a kid that needs to be All-American this year, and I'll go to bat for her and what she's doing, and I'm proud of her. This one right here, she controls the boards, controls the rebound, does a great job. She's our captain and our leader. And the one down there, she doesn't know who Jamaal Wilkes is. Maybe you young ones don't, either. But he was called "Silk" back then when he played for the Lakers, and this is our version of Jamaal Wilkes and "Silk" because she's so smooth. She's so smooth. But give credit to this team. Notre Dame is probably the best team we've played this year, them and Mississippi State. So give them all kudos. Muffet made some great calls. Their high-low game was hurting us. That's why they're defending national champions. Go. Q. Chennedy, can you talk about how you were able to settle down after picking up the two quick fouls? CHENNEDY CARTER: Just stay calm. My coach kept me out there. Keep my head up. GARY BLAIR: You can give a little bit better than that. Go ahead, expound a little on that one. Come on down. CHENNEDY CARTER: I mean, it's simple. You get two fouls early, you're not going to complain or quit. Keep playing. Keep your head together. It's fine. Stay within the system. Keep playing defense. It's not a big deal. Stay within the system. Keep playing defense. It's not a big deal. My teammates believed in me. I didn't pick up a third one after that. GARY BLAIR: If it would have been any other team we were playing, she'd have been brought to the bench. I have to trust my bench. But when you're playing Notre Dame, it could have been over in the first quarter, and she comes and sits by me, and that's why we trust her. Q. Chennedy, when you guys were coming off the court, I saw you take all your teammates in and embrace them, telling them to keep their heads up. Is that your evolution as a leader? Why did you do that? CHENNEDY CARTER: I'm really proud of them. We're a group of sophomores going against seniors, potential draft picks. I was so proud of the way we fought tonight. We fought for four quarters, and we left it all out there on the court. Some of them were disappointed, but I was proud of my teammates. We competed. We're young and we're growing, and I just told them, hey, we're going to be better next year. We'll be back, and we'll make a statement again. Q. Ciera, they had a lot of points in the paint tonight. Are they more athletic than some of the front lines you've seen in the SEC? What kind of challenges did they present? CIERA JOHNSON: Their transition is very good, and also they were able to spread the floor because they can pretty much all shoot it, all the guards can pretty much shoot, so they're able to spread the floor, break you down. And then the plays they run, they run so many screens, and it's just hard to defend. They're a very good offensive team, and they have some good sets and some good plays that they run. Q. Kayla and Chennedy, could you talk about 24, only 10 points at half but came alive in the second half with 24? Did she do anything different or how were you having a tough time controlling her in the second half? KAYLA WELLS: I felt like it started in transition. She got a few easy buckets, and that got her going. So she came out and she was feeling it and she was hitting shots. We were trying to guard her the best way we can, and she just continued to hit shots. CHENNEDY CARTER: She made a lot of good shots. She's a pretty good player. Arike is older, so she's kind of been in some similar situations, so good job to her. Q. Chennedy, where is your range? Where does it stop as far as hitting a three or where you're going to shoot a three from? CHENNEDY CARTER: I don't really know. I'm in the gym a lot, and I really like working on shooting kind of like Steph Curry, so that's where it comes from. I'm really confident in my jump shot. But if I had to pick a spot, I would say that the hash mark where the coaches are at, I probably can shoot from there. Q. Coach touched on you played your best game of the year tonight. Looking at the journey, where was the turning point? What was the maturity to get to this point? CHENNEDY CARTER: Our maturity, I would say it just came from the hard work and hard practices and just preparation. We're a team that knows good we are and how good we can be. I feel like we stay within our system and stay together. These are my sisters, and we are go through everything off the court, on the court, but when it's time to play, we lock in and we play together. And that's where our maturity comes in, and games like this prepare us to take on better challenges. So I would say games and coaching. CIERA JOHNSON: Obviously our maturity has grown over the year. Considering we had a loss to Lamar, a lot of people probably thought we couldn't make it to the Sweet 16 let alone maybe even make the tournament. So I think that through each game, each game we're continuing to play with each other more, getting a feel for the game and understanding. We're becoming smarter, we're becoming better and we're getting older. We have to credit that to the coaches, as well, but also to us playing as a team and just sticking together. Q. Could you see how Chennedy could get in people's heads? Have you seen that sort of happen over the course of the year? GARY BLAIR: I've seen it happen for two straight years. The last game we played last year against Notre Dame, correct me if I'm wrong, did she have 37 whacks in that game? 31. So I guess I coached her up this one. The ability to score off of the bounce, I mean, nobody does it better than her, okay? It was hard getting -- they were walling up, getting her thing, and she missed a couple of the drives, and she didn't get any reputation calls, okay. That we didn't get. We had to earn everything we got in there. And it was a well-called ball game. But she averages about nine free throws a ball game, and that's when the jump shot goes down and they're making her shoot a 25-footer, I want her to drive the ball. She couldn't drive it so much in the first half because she already had two fouls, and so sometimes she tries to make the home run call. But folks, there's nobody in the game like her doing what she can. She plays the point and the 2 guard. How about this: She's not even in the top 5 in the WBCA for point guards this year. She didn't even make the list. How's that? Unbelievable. But I'm proud of her. But she is very good with her teammates. That's the hardest thing. Last year when she was a freshman, it was hard to embrace a freshman as your best player if you had a veteran team, okay. It would have been like a stud freshman coming to Notre Dame and taking over for Arike and Shepard and Turner and all that. It would have been very difficult for Muffet. It was very difficult for me last year to coach that. But they love her now. We love her. She loves us. She's very good. Q. Gary, in that three-minute span in the fourth quarter, it went from tied to seven-point, what do you feel the difference was in that part? GARY BLAIR: The percentage shots. This is the first team, correct me, that has shot over 50 percent on us all year. Who are you going to stop? The only one we stopped was Mabrey, and Mabrey wasn't at 100 percent health-wise, but we were doing a pretty good job. Guess who was guarding Mabrey a lot of the time? It was Chennedy, okay. And then she gets switched off on Arike, and that's a nightmare for any of us because Arike is that good. But the role, the transition baskets, I think they hit four points in a row and I had to use another time-out, I thought that was the key right there. We just couldn't stop them from scoring. Q. Chennedy scored 35, but she needed 34 shots to get there. Was that just the athleticism and the length of Notre Dame, kind of the game plan -- GARY BLAIR: That's what a scorer has to do. That's what Kobe Bryant had to do all his life. He could go 7 for 24 and the Lakers would win. Michael Jordan had a lot of those games, too. Throw the stats out the window because we were getting some of the boards and put-backs and everything what she was creating. She was triple-teamed in there a lot, as well. So stats, throw out the window. The ability to create your shot and put a team on your shoulders and be able to handle a miss, there's a lot of kids that can't handle a miss. She can handle a miss as well as anybody and step back up, think about the next shot she's going to make. 17 boards, that's the difference in the ball game. But here's another thing that you never see in a women's basketball game: Seven turnovers for us, nine for them. That's damned good basketball. That's what people are going to tune in to watch in the women's game. That's what we've got to get to. Great games like that, was well played and well-coached, and I have a very, very good staff that was working with me, and you look down at her staff, and her staff is as veteran as ours, even probably even more veteran. Q. When you look back over the season now, were there one or two games, what were the moments when this team grew up to where you could play your best game tonight? GARY BLAIR: Well, we grew up sort of by accident when we lost our second leading scorer in Carter-Riverside game. Nobody saw, and then all of a sudden we were playing Oregon State, it was played so late over in Maui, we went out there and controlled the whole game. And I looked back at my assistants and said: Maybe we're better than what we thought. You lose that player and you put a junior college in, you move Chennedy to the 2, who hadn't played it in a year and a half, that's when we grew up. We just said, what the heck. People didn't expect much. Our goal this year was to simply get to the NCAA Tournament for the 14th year in a row. That will not be our goal next year. We can play with the big girls. We just showed it. And Notre Dame did not play bad, they played damned good. We played almost damned good (chuckles). Appreciate the coverage. Write, build our game up. We need y'all as much as y'all need us. And hopefully all of you are here because you want to be here. You weren't assigned to this and you had to cover it. You're here because you want to be in the women's game or covering it. That's what we need. There's a lot of great stories that are out there. Y'all have fun. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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