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SOUTHEASTERN CONFERENCE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENTMarch 7, 2020Mike NeighborsMakayla DanielsAmber RamirezNashville, Tennessee South Carolina 90, Arkansas 64 THE MODERATOR: We are joined by Arkansas. We will start with an opening statement from Coach Neighbors. MIKE NEIGHBORS: So much on day three of the tournament for our team is about how we're going to find our spark. Then you have to hope that when you're playing the No. 1 seed, the No. 1 overall seed in the tournament, maybe they don't have their best game. Took us a while to find our spark. They played very well. We didn't get a B effort or A-minus effort from them. Dawn may disagree, but I thought we got an A effort from them. Proud of our kids in the third quarter, made some adjustments, gave ourselves I think a lot to work on this next week as we get ready for the NCAA tournament. THE MODERATOR: Questions for the student-athletes. Q. Amber, it seemed like your team was able to get into a little bit of a groove in the third quarter. Didn't matter what style of game you played, South Carolina was able to answer. How frustrating was that? AMBER RAMIREZ: I don't think it was frustrating. I think that spark we had -- like Coach said, they're the No. 1 team in the country, they made shots, they battled on the boards. I think the spark we had gave them a little bit of a shake. I think they just made shots and we just battled as hard as we could. Q. Makayla, you are a very tough-minded team. How quickly can you get over this loss and get ready for the tournament? MAKAYLA DANIELS: I think once we land back home, we're going to be over it and we're going to be looking forward to the tournament, seeing what we can do to get better until then. Q. Amber, you knew going into this game their size was going to present some problems. How could you counteract that? Was it a matter of trying to go up-tempo? AMBER RAMIREZ: Yeah, they're pretty big. I think we just had to box out. I think there were some assignments we missed boxing out. But that was our main focus going into the game was just putting a body on their bodies. Q. Amber, this is the third game you had to claw back. Do you think having three games in three days, a little bit of fatigue kicked in in the second half? AMBER RAMIREZ: No, because we had our spark in the third quarter. I think fatigue wasn't a factor. Obviously we are tired since it is the third day. But I think we kept pushing till the end. Q. Makayla, after last year's run, not quite making the NCAA tournament, looking ahead to that, does a series of stepping stones seem to be aligning here going forward? MAKAYLA DANIELS: I kind of think we're further than we were last year. I think we've kind of distinguished ourselves to being in the tournament. Last year we were kind of on the bubble. I think this year we've put ourselves in a position to be in the tournament. Q. Amber, how good did it feel to see your jumper finally fall this game? AMBER RAMIREZ: It was a good feeling. My teammates had confidence in me to still give me the ball, let me keep shooting the ball. I knew one game they were going to fall because I'm a shooter. It felt pretty good. THE MODERATOR: Ladies, thank you. We will continue with questions for Coach Neighbors. MIKE NEIGHBORS: They were tired. They don't want to say it because they're prideful. On day three you're tired. Playing these guys, whether you played two games before it or not, they make you tired. Every pass is contested, every cut is contested, every rebound. They tire you out. We got tired. I could tell because here is how you can tell when we get tired: when we are slow in transition offense. Sometimes we don't get back on transition defense when we're perfectly not tired. But we'll still find a way to run an offense. We were tired running back. You could tell, from everybody. You don't ever have to play three games in three days the rest of the season. It's really hard to do. I think it's a great challenge for us. It's incredibly hard. It's why we have the byes. That's why we've talked about the importance of every game. We'll have to draw from that this year. We have a lot of evidence that if we could have found a way to get one more win somewhere along the way, we would have gotten a bye. Then you don't have to talk about this. This is not a question. That's the importance of this. That's what is next for us, getting the first and second round bye. She talked about the stepping stones. I think this is the next step in that. Last year we were up here campaigning for us to get in. This year you're going to hear me campaign for our league. We have the No. 1 team overall in our league. Historically when that team has been UConn or another conference, the Big Ten, or Big 12, that has been rewarded by the committee for having the No. 1 overall seed in the tournament. We had to play these guys three times, and we've got eight losses, right? Three of them are those guys. A lot of people are going to lose to those guys three times if they play three times. A lot of other teams in our league that had to play them twice. I hope when the committee gets together after everything shakes out, Alabama, they're looking at Alabama to be a tournament team. They're looking to make sure that Tennessee keeps their streak alive and stays in this thing. We have had to play the No. 1 overall seed in the tournament within our league. Some of us, again, multiple times. Q. Given all that, you knew there was a potential to be tired. When you cut it from 19 to 7, did you think you were in it or were you on fumes? MIKE NEIGHBORS: I knew we were on fumes. Do we sub or try to ride it out? From what I've learned from watching other coaches do it in the past, you ride it out. You see if you can find a way. We've done it. We got tired yesterday against Texas A&M. I was going to take another timeout. I took blame. I should have called a timeout one possession earlier. If there's some South Carolina people in here, they'll hopefully cosign this, they finish quarters and halves maybe better than any team I've had to watch. They did it the other night against whoever they played in the first round. It was tight, then the next thing you look up you're down 12 or 15. They just finish quarters. The crowd was phenomenal. I thought it was good for our teams to play on what is going to go down as a neutral site game that did not feel like a neutral site game. We know we're going to go on the road for the NCAA tournament. It was really, really good practice for us this week. Like you said, everything in consideration, it was ride it out, see what happened. We got a really good look at a three. Amber got a really good look at a three on a little kick-out, she was just tired. Q. You knew their size was going to present some problems. Them being able to shoot it makes it difficult. You were hoping they weren't going to make those? MIKE NEIGHBORS: Yeah. If you're going to let Aliyah Boston play the three, just give up. You're going to move her to the three spot, let her start stepping out, shooting threes. Victaria Saxton has annihilated us for years. When they put that big lineup in there, I think we kind of slowed them down with that little matchup we were running, a little junk defense. They have no holes. There was no holes. There's nothing you can watch, glean. You can go to all the coaches clinics in the history of this world and you're not going to find a hole in this team. Donald tried to downplay them so they could stay sharp. They're as complete a team as we've had to face. I was going to qualify it, but probably the hardest team we've had to play against anyplace I've ever coached. Q. Can you speak on the play of Henderson coming off the bench tonight. MIKE NEIGHBORS: She's killed us, too. She was a freshman. She was a kid that in the matchup, the ball was going to find her eventually. Ty Harris is too good to not find that kid in the right spots at the right time. It wasn't that we didn't respect her. It wasn't that we said that's the kid we're not going to guard. It's just the kid that the ball kept finding. I think she's played a tremendous role for them all year long. She's another player that's always played really good against us. THE MODERATOR: Thank you. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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