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SOUTHEASTERN CONFERENCE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENTMarch 6, 2020Mike NeighborsChelsea DungeeKiara WilliamsNashville, Tennessee Arkansas 67, Texas A&M 66 THE MODERATOR: We are joined by Arkansas. We will start with an opening statement from Coach Neighbors. MIKE NEIGHBORS: We've obviously built our program around defense wins championships. Defensive stop won the game for a change, so... Really proud of our poise to stick together after another really tough start against -- just tougher circumstances and a tougher situation. Really quality team. I thought for the majority of the game, it didn't look good for us. When you only lead for 8.4 seconds of the game, it's the most important part. This is one of those games we'll have to go kind of go back and rewatch to remember exactly how it happened. The timeouts were really key all the way through. The halftimes, the way they were talking to each other, the words they were using, the way they just talked to each other is the reason that no deficit is ever too much to count this team out. THE MODERATOR: Questions for the student-athletes. Q. Kiara, talk me through the two free throws. KIARA WILLIAMS: With the rebound, I was looking at the ball. It didn't matter who was in front of me or who was around. The ball was my go-to. During those free throws, I remember I was thinking I made all of them the whole game, like, these two aren't any different, yet it's big. I can still, like, make them. That was my whole thing, is just trying to stay poised, not think too much. I knew my team needed it, so I wanted to pull through for them. Q. Chelsea, did the zone they was running at you in the first half seem to bother you a little bit? CHELSEA DUNGEE: We struggled to get in the gap and force a second person. But once we settled into it and found our shot, we got a little bit of a momentum going. Q. Chelsea, what was the message in the final timeout before the defensive stop? CHELSEA DUNGEE: Just to flood the gap. We knew Chennedy was going to take the last shot. Just helping whoever was guarding her, helping our teammate, securing the rebound. Q. Both of you speak on the overall team effort you displayed today. CHELSEA DUNGEE: I think we fought the whole game. Our three-point shot, we struggled from time to time, but we fought together, we stayed together, especially on the defensive side, being in those gaps, helping each other out. KIARA WILLIAMS: Same thing. During halftime, this is probably the one of the most times that we've, like, ever sat down and talked, actually listened to each other. Hey, this is what we need to do. We all came together as one. It clicked on defense in the right time. We knew our shots was going to fall. We've been in those situations many a times before. We knew, tried to keep telling Chelsea, Amber, Lexi, Keep shooting, we knew they were going to make it. Q. Kiara, perception of the team, fair or unfair, is up-tempo, shoot the three. You had to grind one out here. Does that change that in any way? KIARA WILLIAMS: Everybody knows we're a three-point shooting team. Everyone knows their role. When that's not falling, we just try to have other people step up. With that I think me and my teammate Taylah did a good job defensive-wise in helping that out so it wouldn't be as much pressure on offense. CHELSEA DUNGEE: I think this team is special because at any given night anybody can take over and help us win. I think that's the special thing about this team. Q. Chelsea, you were both in this situation a year ago. How much did last year continue to help you? CHELSEA DUNGEE: We mentioned that. We had a little pregame video that we watched. We watched those last couple of minutes. That inspired us that we knew what we were against and we knew what it took to win. KIARA WILLIAMS: We just kept saying that we've been here before. We all know what we're capable of, how to shot, how to get stops. We just needed to lock in, and we all knew we could do it. Q. Kiara, knowing that you're going to have to get some points in the paint somewhere, did you sense maybe you were going to have some kind of increased role in this game? KIARA WILLIAMS: At first my mindset was just to play defense and to stop them on offensive rebounds. When we noticed that Ciera went out, that was the time that I was like, Okay, I can score, I just need to step up and try it. Hopefully my teammates have my back. And they did, so... THE MODERATOR: Ladies, thank you very much. We'll continue with questions for Coach Neighbors. Q. How big was the opening of the second half with the 8-0 run and cut into that deficit? MIKE NEIGHBORS: Maybe even got to 10. I think Jeff said that. We talked at halftime about throwing it. We drew a little circle on where we needed to get it to either by driving it there or throwing it there. That's what Kiara was talking about. Then that opened up. That was the key to getting it opened up a little bit, and those couple of shots fell. The key to building momentum is when you tell the kids something, you hope it works because that makes them feel like, Okay, this is it. We had a couple of very good breaks go our way that just snowballed. Y'all know our team well enough. When we get just a little bit of momentum, that crowd rises up behind us, everything starts to click for us. It can be a bad thing for us when we can't find that spark. The first four minutes of the third quarter, our goal was always to make the opponent's coach call a timeout in the third quarter, and we made him call two. Q. When the shots weren't falling early on, how important was it to get the ball in the paint? MIKE NEIGHBORS: With us you know it's going to come, but the longer it goes, the more apprehensive you get and the harder they get to make. We kept talking about driving it, drive it in there and either score or find somebody with a little bit better shot. They forced us to take some really tough shots early on. Their defense was really, really good. When Ciera went out and they went small, it kind of threw us for a little bit of a loop because we weren't as prepared for that lineup. We made a couple of adjustments and I thought we were able to get it inside driving it. We had 26 points in the paint against them the first time, we only had six at halftime. It was a key to keep us from hanging around. We're not going to win if we don't make a few threes. You certainly can't come back from down 17 with a bunch of free throws and 2s. It was important that that opened up the three-point line. Q. You fell into a media timeout this time. MIKE NEIGHBORS: Yeah. I knew this game, we had a chance to win it in the end. I didn't want to waste the timeout. The media was close. 12 was kind of my number. They were setting on 12. Did they get to 12-0? 30 seconds away, we were able to save that one this time. That's just knowing your team, knowing your kids, knowing you don't have to do the same thing every time to get the same result. If we would have lost by one point, I probably would have gone back and second-guessed myself to death. I'm not going to overstate that it made that big of a difference. I just think knowing your team, if you give this group confidence and a glimmer of hope, they'll usually come through for you. Q. Alexis had an off day today, maybe got a little flustered. The talks you've had with her. Secondly, what was going through your mind when Kiara was at the free-throw line and then on that 8-second defensive stand? MIKE NEIGHBORS: I'll answer in reverse order. Remind me about the Lex part. Kiara has been shooting it great in practice. We were over there talking about when she makes it, not the 'if' contingencies. When she makes this, let's make sure we have our best defensive lineup in there. She's a senior. She's filled a role this year, battled through injuries. We all talked about how vital she has been in staying with our program when we got there. Had that feeling she was going to make them both. We did sub. Went with a small lineup that we can switch out on. We wanted to switch all ball screens. Instead of going five guards, Taylah is basically a big guard. She and Chennedy were high school teammates. I don't know if everybody put that together. They played together for a long time. She wanted to be in the game at the end. If you go back and look at the clip, when they switched screens, she is in a defensive stance and made her take a really tough shot. There was a little strategy involved in the defensive switching. Talking to Lex, she has matured so much. She knows way ahead of anything I'm going to say to her. About the time I get ready to say something, she already has those words coming out of her mouth. I got this, I can do some other things to help us win, I'm going to hit a big one. Her voice in the timeouts were important when we were going offense, defense. If we can survive that night, we still haven't had all three clicking yet, we'll have a night. It's going to take a night like that tomorrow night to beat South Carolina, that's for sure. Q. Carolina throws a ton of bigs at teams. How are you going to offset their height advantage? MIKE NEIGHBORS: We don't have a really good answer for that one. They've really dominated us two times with their size. We'll try to turn it into a track meet. But the problem with doing that against them is they're pretty good at track meets, too. There's not a weakness they have. We'll have to be on the top of our game, hope we can catch them maybe looking past to a championship game or something. Maybe the big crowd here, the pressure of playing in front of the home crowd gets too much. They have really established themselves as clearly one of the best teams in the country. The size is just part of it. It's athletic size, agile size, strong size. They know how to play basketball. They're coached by the Olympic team coach. Got our work cut out for us tomorrow. Q. Winning a game with a defensive possession... MIKE NEIGHBORS: Doesn't happen very often. I mean, it wasn't just that one possession. We played great defense in the last six minutes of the game. We were flooding in gaps, made their shots a lot harder, really cleaned up their offensive rebounding. They didn't get one when they needed it. That last possession is the one everybody talks about. We had to get some stops along the way. You can't cut into a 17-point lead trading buckets. It was tough. We talked about doing it from the get-go, but talking about it and being about it is two completely different things. Amber is such a good help-side defender. Once she started getting in the right spots... Nobody has talked about Makayla Daniels, the job that kid does night in and night out, guarding the other team's best player. She guarded Chennedy Carter and made her work for it. She had to take 25 shots to get 23 points. Makayla and A'T did a great job tag teaming her. Makayla as a freshman came in here and not only done that but is she our leading scorer today, too? THE MODERATOR: That's correct. MIKE NEIGHBORS: Wow, yeah. THE MODERATOR: Thank you for your time today. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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