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ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT

March 5, 2020

Greensboro, North Carolina

Georgia Tech - 68, Pitt - 58

THE MODERATOR: Like to welcome Lance White as well as Davshanette Harris and Amber Brown. Coach, when you're ready.

LANCE WHITE: I was really pleased with, you know, our effort for a long period of time. These kids, recruiting them and told them this year they're going to have to make all the mistakes underneath the bright lights. For four freshmen, junior college player, they have come in and done everything I've asked.

They've -- step by step, by step, by growth, by all of those things that you have to do to be able to be a good college player, and, again, to see these last two games where so much of it we've talked about trust the process, and then to be able to see us -- you never know when that -- some of those things are going to come into play and you're going to see the end result of it.

To see that their growth and their games have improved, it's really, as a coach, rewarding to watch them do that.

I'm excited that, again, they've laid the foundation of what we're going to be in the future. Obviously we've gotta get some help. They've got to -- we need a couple more classes to come alongside them and the energy and the competitiveness that they have brought. I'm most excited that these freshmen will become sophomores, and they quickly become juniors by the amount of minutes and the games that they've had to play.

We talked in the off-season that you don't know what you don't know. They've had to learn a lot. Very, very quickly. Now on the ACC level they're able to understand what I'm talking about and how hard and how fundamentally skilled you have to be in order to be a great basketball team.

So I'm ready, I'm anxious to get back to work with them and give them a little bit of time and then get back in the gym and take that next step in our program.

Q. You were down 3 points going into the fourth quarter. What killed the momentum?
LANCE WHITE: You know, we made a couple of turnovers, and for us that hurts us, obviously. The thing that Pan is able to do, obviously as a senior player that knows how to get to the free throw line, knows how to score buckets and all of that, and it's been our Achilles' heel all year, that things go wrong and then we implode.

So, again, you get it close, 3 points, and then now you've got to do those same things over and over and over again. We struggled with that a little bit and hopefully some maturity will play in, and we can get better skill development and then be ready to play.

Q. You said at the beginning of the season they were going to have to learn a lot. Looking back over the whole season what do you think their biggest area of improvement has been? Going forward what do you need to improve more in?
LANCE WHITE: Their biggest area of improvement has been mental toughness. Again, we brought in seven new players, five of them freshmen, four of them were able to compete.

So you bring all of that that you don't really know what you have. Again, watching Day those first couple of practices could go right extremely well, couldn't go left very well. To watch her practice after practice work on that skill, her ability to shoot the jumper consistently, and I think you saw today at a very high level with defense trying to completely take her out of it, she was able to score and shoot that consistently.

And AB, same, not being able to shoot the jumper and today now being able to see her abilities to do that; more so than anything is just their mental toughness. You go from high school to college and you don't understand possessions, you don't understand how, you know -- one thing is that you're used to playing offensive and defense when it's convenient. Now you have to play defense. You have to get through screens and just all of the mentality and for us as we were losing.

So then it's that confidence and all of those things, which this group stayed with me throughout the entire season. For the year that we've had and the number of losses and to keep them energized and focused on getting better every day, that's their biggest thing that I'm most pleased with and proud of.

Q. Coach, Coach Fortner noted your ability to game plan and had positive things to say about that. What was your game plan going into today's game, and maybe how was it different than yesterday's?
LANCE WHITE: You know for us, having such young kids, we haven't been able to scheme as much as we would probably like so we have had to keep things simple and basic. But at the same time if you can do a couple of things really well, and I thought for us the transition defensive part had to be a big key. We couldn't give them easy buckets, so we tried to contain that as much as we could and not let them get layups.

I think we did a pretty good job of being able to do that. So playing off of Fletcher and making her try to shoot outside shots and trying to get to Pan -- and obviously 26 points later we didn't quite get that done as much as we needed to, but, again, it was trying to do that.

Trying to rebound with them, I always felt if we could stay within five, we could be in it, and they outrebounded us six. They outrebounded us by 20 last time so this was a huge step forward.

Q. For Day and AB. Yesterday you beat Notre Dame, historic win for the program. Today you push probably a team that's going to the NCAA Tournament to the brink, going down into the fourth quarter. How do y'all feel? I know this loss probably stings, but how do you feel about the future of this program and being the core of what Coach is trying to build on?
AMBER BROWN: We feel great about it. We are ready to attack the off-season. Everybody is coming back except for Bug, and we've pretty much finished the season without Bug, but I feel like we're stronger together. So moving on into the off-season, just attack and skill development, as Coach said, and ready to attack everybody else in the next season.

DAVSHANETTE HARRIS: What AB said. (Laughter.)

Q. I'll give you another one, Day. This is your third game in a row with 20 or more points. Can you talk about the progress that you've made as a player this season and how strong you finished it?
DAVSHANETTE HARRIS: The progress I've made this season? It's been tough, been a tough road. Didn't start very well, but I knew that I needed to step up my game a little bit, so in order to do that I needed my teammates to push me in the right direction, and my coaches.

I was pretty proud of the way that we came together these last couple of games, and I can't wait for you guys to see what we got comin'.

LANCE WHITE: And I think, you know, too, it's been -- I feel great with these two. We talked when I first got the job we had to become more athletic, we had to look like an ACC team, and we had to get competitors.

Whenever I'm standing beside these two, and sitting beside them today; they are both of those things. The competitiveness is something that's so hard to tell. You watch them in AAU, and you watch them with their high school teams but it's got to be something where you hate to lose.

These two, and by their performance all year long and, again, we were outmanned and don't have enough yet to be able to compete with everyone we have to compete with, but their fight, game after game after game and getting down and battling back, and that for me is where I feel great about where we're going as a program.

THE MODERATOR: Thank you very much. Appreciate you guys.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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