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SOUTHEASTERN CONFERENCE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENTMarch 8, 2020Dawn StaleyMikiah Herbert HarriganBrea BealGreenville, South Carolina South Carolina 76, Mississippi State 62 THE MODERATOR: I am joined by the student-athletes. Coach Staley will join us later. Questions for the student-athletes. Q. Kiki, how does it feel to be an SEC champ? What makes this team different than the other SEC Championship teams you've been a part of? MIKIAH HERBERT HARRIGAN: This was great. It's just really fun out there playing with these group of girls. We have a lot of fun together playing. That makes it a hundred times better. It just feels great. Q. Kiki, do you like the nickname 'Mad Kiki'? It looks like you got a little mad out there today. Does that emotion help fuel your game? MIKIAH HERBERT HARRIGAN: Yes, that emotion does help to fuel my game. And I do like the name Mad Kiki (laughter). Q. Brea, how do you think you and Ty's leadership styles and personalities complement each other? BREA BEAL: I feel like it complements each other well. Me and Ty, coming into this year, we knew we had a young group coming in. Just to try to lead them and be there for them on the court, that's what we've been doing. Q. Brea, you talked before the season about winning championships. This is not the ultimate one. How does it feel to be an SEC champion? How did it meet your expectations? BREA BEAL: I think a freshman, I didn't really know what to expect. Just to see the outcome of all the hard work we put in with each other, it's crazy, surreal. Q. What were you feeling in the first quarter? BREA BEAL: I think we all individually knew our roles, what we had to do. When I went out there, I knew I had to lock in on defense and rebounds. Q. Brea, the first game with them this year was really tight. You had to come back in the fourth quarter. How did you get out so quickly against them this time and keep them at bay? BREA BEAL: I think with the last game, we looked back, a lot of adjustments we had to make for one another, who we had to guard, who is going to guard who, how we should guard them. It was little things like that that helped us gain that lead early in the game. THE MODERATOR: Coach Staley, would you like to join us. Welcome. DAWN STALEY: Thank you. THE MODERATOR: Any more questions for Brea and Kiki? Ladies, thank you. Congratulations on your championship. They represented you well, Coach. They were great. We'll open up the floor now for questions for Coach Staley. Q. You said the other day that you only like big hardware. How does this hardware meet your expectations? How in place is this team to win another one in a couple weeks? DAWN STALEY: I mean, I'm happy for our players. I mean, they've worked hard. I'm happy for our fans who worked equally as hard. Coming into this building, all weekend long, spending their hard-earned money. I hope it's worth it. I hope whatever they had to dish out was worth it with the excitement they brought in the building. They allowed us to win this championship. I'm always proud to represent this conference in this way because of the great coaches that are in it, the great players. I mean, we're talented. Our league is talented. We'll be talented for the near future. But when you win this league, when you win this tournament, it puts you in a position of competing on a broader scale, that's competing for a national championship. That's what we'll try to do in the next phase of our season. Q. You've credited this team's chemistry all year long. How do you keep this kind of dominant performance and attitude through the next 12 days before you start the big tournament? DAWN STALEY: Rest. I mean, rest is important. It's hard to stay on like we've had to be over the past couple of months. We mix in just days off. I mean, we took a couple earlier in the week that put us in a position to just have enough stamina along with our depth. We'll take a few days off. It is spring break. They'll enjoy themselves. We'll reconvene at the end of the week and we'll take it from there. But this team has really been focused when it was time to focus. They also are focused. Unfocused from a basketball standpoint, when it's time to be unfocused. They will be unfocused for the next few days, and rightfully so. They need to decompress a little bit. Q. Is there any doubt in your mind that you are the No. 1 overall seed for the NCAA? DAWN STALEY: There wasn't a doubt, win, lose or draw this tournament. There wasn't a doubt. I don't think anybody has the résumé that we have. But this is the way you take that out of the question. I don't know what scenarios they could come up with. I mean, there's none that would fit the profile that we had. All the things the committee deems necessary for a team to be a No. 1 seed, No. 1 overall seed, I think we check all the boxes. Q. A common statement throughout the season from opposing coaches is that this is your best team in your time at South Carolina. What do you think would lead opposing coaches to say that? What are some of the best characteristics about this team that stand out above the 11 others? DAWN STALEY: I mean, it's a good team. A good chemistry team. Good team that competes on both sides of the ball. It's a team that doesn't like losing. Losing, I'm not talking about games or plays, but inches. If you create an advantage, they want to fight to gain that advantage back. I think we're good on both sides of the ball. I said this yesterday, things we aren't good at we make up for, what we're able to do on both sides of the basketball. Overall we have great leaders, great talent. They seem to just have gelled all season long. Q. What has been able to be the difference with this team since being able to arrive on campus? How have they been able to grow to get to this point? DAWN STALEY: I mean, I'm not going to say they came in eagle-less. The eagle is the thing that keeps them motivated and wanting to be the best. They came in with a want to win. They don't care how that looks for them. They don't care. I mean, Aliyah Boston, we got her the ball three, four times tonight. No complaints. They just kept gobbling up rebounds, blocking shots, running the floor. I mean, it is that. I thought our leaders, Kiki, had a great tournament. Just incredible focus on her part. I was happy because we can go back a few months when she said this isn't the place she wants to be, this place doesn't make her happy. I did make sure I got to her after the game and I just said, Kiki, I know you didn't envision this a few months ago. She said, I didn't, but now I'm a believer. Sometimes kids, they don't operate on faith. They operate on the known, the tangible thing that is in front of them. It's our job to paint that picture of what it should look like, her commitment to herself, this team allows her to be the MVP of this tournament. And that's huge. Q. How were you able to make the adjustments from that January game you played with these guys? Mississippi State, still one of the best teams in the country, that game comes down to the end. This one you had in control from the start. DAWN STALEY: I mean, I would just say we have open dialogue with our players last night, it was 10:00 at night. We're going over our scouting report with our players. I asked Ty, How you want to play this? How you want to play them? She was like, We need to zone them. Coach Fred's scout. He talked about zoning them before they got in the room. I'm just like, you hear it once, you hear it twice from a player, then you just kind of formulating. Although we didn't play a whole, whole lot of zone, we created zone concepts within our man. That was what got them under control because they weren't having their way with dribble-drive down the lane. Our commitment to that. It's that type of team where we had very little practice and we just talked about things. They can see it. When you have a team like that that can visualize it and see it without having to have a hundred reps and a lot of prep time, that's probably the difference maker in teams of our past and this present team, that they just have a better understanding of how to play the game. Q. There in the second quarter, things got a little testy. With a younger team getting ready for the bigger stage, how do you stress the importance of being able to play with emotional but not getting emotional? DAWN STALEY: That's really almost the first time that it got to that point. If Aliyah is involved in it, you don't really have to worry about any confrontation. She did say, She picked the wrong one. I'm thinking, she picked the wrong one meaning I'm going to stand up for myself. She meant, I don't want any part of that, I want to play basketball. Then comes Kiki, she wants all the smoke. She wants it all. For us, I think Kiki has a real good understanding of how she needs to play, what needs to get done. We've been through that, like, three years ago with Kiki. She's the only question mark when it comes to that. She has it under control. We just explain to her what she means to our team. We lose her, we lose a big part of what we do and who we are. Q. Now you're 5-0 in the SEC tournament finals. Every win has been double-digit. What are you telling your team to be able to have them perform at such a high level in these big games? DAWN STALEY: You really don't have to say much to our team. They just know what they have to do. When we prepped for Arkansas, again, we were up, we had our film session. We really didn't have to go over as detailed as we usually do because they just knew. They study the game. They watch our opponents outside of us. They cut our work in half as far as discussion. They knew how we wanted to place. We asked them, How are we going to do this, how we going to do that? Everybody had an answer. That's how you know when a team is ready. Again, you don't have much prep time. We played at 12:00, not much prep time, played 12:00 the next day. Not much prep time, no shootaround. I just know. It's that feeling you know your team is ready to go. Q. It's been you and Coach Schaefer for four of the last five. Top two SEC teams for the last two years. What kind of investment from the university level does it take to help the coaches and the staff build a program in the way you have over the last decade? DAWN STALEY: I mean, you have to have administrators who really don't get in your way. They provide. We're provided whatever we need to land the top recruits in the country. Whether we deliver on that each year, it's on us. We feel like we get everything that we need to get what we need to get done. I think what's happened for us, just aside from an administrative standpoint, it's our fans, the way we're able to create a home-court advantage. We make it look like other national championship teams. When you can win at home, when you can build a fan base, they provide the energy in the building. Sometimes they can account for four or five wins just because they're there, they're loud, invested. I can honestly say our fans are so invested in our program. Look, I'm sitting on the bench and I look up in front of me, I look behind me all the way up to the rafters. There are people sitting there. Those aren't my ideal seats if I go to an arena. I don't even know if I would go sit up top. Our fans came into this building and cheered from the very top. That's what you have to create. They came on the road, they gave up a weekend in March, the weather is breaking. That's what you need. It's a lifestyle. This just isn't a movement; it's a lifestyle. They've been doing this for years. They want to know when our schedule is next year so they can take their days off. It's a very beautiful thing. I think Vic and I have done that, and that's why you see it's really directly correlated with the fans and our connection with the fans and our success. THE MODERATOR: Thank you. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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