AMERICAN ATHLETIC CONFERENCE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP

March 9, 2022

Toyelle Wilson

Dickies Arena

SMU Mustangs

Postgame Press Conference

UCF 61, SMU 28

TOYELLE WILSON: Just proud of our girls. Kudos to UCF. They're a great team, ranked 25th in the nation for a reason. First time we got to see them this year. They're really good.

So I'm just proud of our girls and not telling them not to let this one game kind of tell what our story is. And so I'm just proud and hopefully we get selected for WNIT and live to play another game

Q. Coach, when you first arrived here, you said all you wanted to do was to bring joy back to the program and yesterday you were saying you wanted to make history. You've done that and as you leave today, what's the biggest accomplishment you'll remember?

TOYELLE WILSON: Just having our girls be able to play a successful year and finish top four in the conference and win a Power Five. We had some goals this year. Like I said, it was double-figure wins and beat a Power Five school and hopefully get to a conference tournament or a postseason tournament. So we did that. I'm glad we won one game in the conference tournament. We can have something to build off of now, that's what I'm proud of that they actually enjoyed playing this year and had fun.

Again, the girls battled. We had a goal this game to battle on the boards. And we were even, 34-34. So they've been out rebounding people all year. So that's -- that was one of our goals for this game. So we try and take a little bit of the good from everything, no matter what the situation is. And so that's what I like about our kids. They're resilient. They respond. And they don't hang their heads.

Q. Back in November, you said Rome wasn't built in a day. It wasn't built in the length of a basketball season either. Are you still preaching patience to this team?

TOYELLE WILSON: Yeah, I think but also, like, you know, we want to win right away, of course. Any new coach and coaching staff want to win right away. But we still have a lot of growing to do. We still have a lot of pieces to the puzzle that we need. I think we got a lot of good pieces late when we first got here. So now we've got to build off those pieces and add more pieces.

So, again, you know, patience is a virtue, but I'm stingy. I like to win right away

Q. What changes did you make heading into that second quarter? It was pretty tight. It was like a 13-12 quarter. Everybody kept up.

TOYELLE WILSON: Yeah. I think we took care of the ball. I think Paige came in and gave us some really good minutes. Off the bench, her presence. Her presence on the court changed because of her height. And I think that our girls scored the ball. We got stops. Made a couple adjustments offensively. We set a screen a little bit. And we were able to get downhill off of that. And so I was proud that they made that adjustment in the battle. I just wished we battled more than just 20 minutes.