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BIG TEN CONFERENCE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP

March 5, 2020

Suzy Merchant

Indianapolis, Indiana

Purdue - 72, Michigan State - 63

Q. Coach, is there a particular reason that Kayla Belles didn't start tonight?
SUZY MERCHANT: Yeah, the day before we left, she rolled her ankle up, and that's why she hardly played. We were lucky she was even able to move. Typical end to our season, I guess, if you're looking at what's happened to us. All the good players get hurt. She was one of them. We were just doing a quarter-court basic work on a 2-3 zone, because those guys play 2-3 zone. She came down on someone's foot and she could hardly walk. They gave her a shot and tried to tape it up, but she could not go.

Q. Do you have any updates on the status of Moira Joiner? Looked like she was really trying to play through something in the second half.
SUZY MERCHANT: I don't have any updates on her.

Q. Can you just walk us through the fourth quarter push.
SUZY MERCHANT: Yeah, I thought it was great. Obviously Shay is a big part of that. We haven't hardly seen her all year, so it was nice to finally see what a veteran guard can do and how they can kind of put a team on their back, and I thought she's a big reason why that happened.

Q. You guys struggled shooting the ball, especially in the first half, right around 20 percent or so. What do you think was the cause for that?
SUZY MERCHANT: I don't know. Honestly, we just put up 99 points and shot the heck out of the ball the game before. I just think it's youth. Some of these kids, they just aren't consistent in the way they score the ball from a field-goal-percentage standpoint. I think that's been hard. That hasn't been their fault, just meaning that Shay, Drekia, CoCo, those kids were starters with Clouden and Taryn, and those three kids knew what to do. You saw what Shay did in basically one quarter. So it's like they needed -- those freshmen needed time, and they didn't have time. So their confidence is like all over the place. I mean, some of them aren't physically ready to play. They're not -- they got thrown into a fire. I'm not sure they were ready for because they didn't have great scoring leadership around them. You know, so it made it difficult for them, and I think that's why you saw the fluctuation of highs and lows from a scoring standpoint for us. I told them even fouling or whatnot at the end, we still were able to be in a position to get where we needed to get. We just need consistent scorers.

And not having Kayla killed us. I mean, absolutely killed us. I felt like we were really going to struggle in this game without her. She's been playing, giving us 13 points, eight rebounds, then Taiyier can come in and sprinkle in six, eight, ten. We've been getting about 23 points a game from those two. Now we really don't have Kayla. All we have is Taiyier, and she got in foul trouble, and then our next choice is Cydni Dodd, who is not ready and struggles and basically I think had some kind of exercise-induced asthma problem because she played an extra minute or whatever it was.

So I think you're just looking at kids that weren't ready yet and that we didn't expect to be out there, and that's a problem because we lost CoCo in that position.

So it's just like, all those kids that were up here that are all-conference players, starters, kids -- you can't substitute that. You just can't. And you can look at any team in the country, and if you take out like their big dogs, you can maybe handle one but you can't handle four. Four will kill you. And in the women's game, in our game, it really -- not having Kayla here tonight, I felt like we were going to be really out of sync, especially defensively.

Q. And Ae'Rianna Harris and Oden both left about midway through the third quarter with three fouls. You guys really didn't start the run until the fourth quarter. What kind of happened there at the end of the third?
SUZY MERCHANT: We just couldn't buy any baskets. I mean, you look at it, I thought we did a pretty good job of getting looks. Taryn had some good looks, Clouden got to the rim, we were missing lay-ups. We got to the free-throw line a couple times, came up empty. It was kind of simple a little bit that way where we just didn't do a very good job of putting the ball in the basket when those kids were out.

Q. Hopes of the NCAA Tournament are most likely gone. How are you going to go about preparing for a possible WNIT berth?
SUZY MERCHANT: I don't even know where we're at. We're so injured right now, I don't even know if we could go, meaning field a team at this point. That's a discussion I'll have with our higher-ups, but right now it's more about just like celebrating these kids right now and figuring out -- we're just very beat up, and there's things that you guys don't even know that are on paper that I have that you'll never know, and there's other issues, too. So it's like we've got to kind of weigh that out a little bit.

We're just really banged up, beat up, tore up. I don't know where we stand with that quite yet. That's a decision that we'll have to make in the future. But certainly not today.

Q. Despite all the injuries and the lack of shooting in the first three quarters, down 15 starting the fourth, you guys made a great comeback, led by the seniors Taryn and Shay. How important is that to have a team that's resilient even though they came up short?
SUZY MERCHANT: Yeah, I think you can see teams that quit. That's pretty obvious, and this team didn't quit, and they hadn't quit all year. We've gone into games where we have people in the hotel room throwing up and another one with a concussion and couldn't make a trip, and then the next day someone tears an Achilles. It's just been insane.

So their resiliency to me has been pretty positive. I know they're disappointed in what could have been. I think this team 100 percent healthy is probably a top-17 team, -18 team, fluctuates depending. But it wasn't that. We didn't have those kids all year long, and when you don't have that, you don't have the leadership, and that's the thing that I think you want to put more value on. Mo goes out there and plays hard, but Mo has never been here, right, so same thing with Julia. It's like they don't know what they don't know. Next year they'll know a little bit better, but you can't force experience.

And I think if there was one thing I would say about the group that was left, Taryn and Clouden in particular were the two kids that played the most minutes over the course of their careers that were the veterans, per se, I think those kids did as good of a job as they can trying to bring along a very young class.

But a lot fell on them, and it wasn't always easy for them to live up to that. They needed some help sometimes, and when they got it, we were really pretty solid team. But when we didn't get it, then we had some issues, as you can see, scoring droughts, tough match-ups, missed assignments, things like that.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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