NCAA WOMEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP: FIRST ROUND - CHARLOTTE VS INDIANA

March 18, 2022

Octavia Jett-Wilson

Jada McMillian

KeKe McKinney

Cara Consuegra

Charlotte 49ers

Media Conference

THE MODERATOR: Thanks everybody for joining us. We're pleased to be joined by Charlotte student-athletes Octavia Jett-Wilson, Jada McMillian, and KeKe McKinney.

Q. Octavia, you've had a big conference tournament, named MVP. So what has Coach been preaching to you guys as you prepare for Indiana tomorrow?

OCTAVIA JETT-WILSON: Everything remains the same. We prepare just how we prepare for any other team we have been preparing for. I think, most of all, we're just excited to be here. We're taking this experience, and everybody doesn't get this experience. We're taking all of it, and we're just ready to play.

Q. KeKe, Indiana's got some pretty big post players. So just what's your preparation been like getting ready to face arguably your toughest test yet?

KEKE MCKINNEY: Just be physical. I think that's going to be the biggest thing for me is obviously she's a great post player. They have a lot of them. But just be physical and trust my teammates to help me out down there.

Q. Jada, I'll start with you. How are you guys balancing the portion of you that's really glad to make it this far and what that means for the program, but also what you have to do tomorrow?

JADA MCMILLIAN: I think pretty much my team is staying levelheaded. Like Tay said, we're very happy to be here. Being able to experience this is big for us and our school, but we also know what we came here to do. We have a job to get done, and that's what we're going to stay focused on doing.

Q. This is for Octavia. What's your mindset? You've been playing all these games. You've had quite the busy last couple of weeks, especially with the conference tournament. How do you personally kind of stay in the zone and kind of set aside all the emotions of getting in the tournament but also being in a big moment like tomorrow?

OCTAVIA JETT-WILSON: Once again, we had a really great time winning our conference and winning conference championship. I think for this team, we all know how to dial it back down. We've had a couple days to come with -- we had a couple days to intake the win and just to know how far we've gotten to come here. So just being with that, we have to start back over, I think that's our mindset.

Our mindset is that's over. We celebrated that. It's time to reach new heights and reach a new goal with coming into the game tomorrow. Like I said, we're all excited and happy for this experience. So no doubt in our mind, we're not going to take this for granted. We're going to go out and play just how we've been playing. We have great momentum now. Coming off of those wins, we're going to keep playing how we've been playing.

I expect us to play how we've been playing and just -- I don't know, we're just excited to be here.

Q. In your scouting on Indiana, what is the number one thing that you have noticed about the Hoosiers so far?

JADA MCMILLIAN: Well, for one, I like to watch a lot of basketball. So I've seen them play a lot of times. I can just say that they're all great players. It's a good team. I know what we're capable of as well. So we're just going out there to play hard and stay focused on what we know how to play, which is Charlotte basketball.

Yeah, other than that, they are a very good team from post players down to guards.

Q. Jada, one thing Coach talked a lot about last week is how her and the coaching staff challenged you to get back to the scoring that you produced last season, and she refers to that little mid-range pull-up as your kill shot. You showed a lot of that, especially in the North Texas game last week and the La Tech game. Where does that confidence come from? Is it your teammates, or do you find it within?

JADA MCMILLIAN: I would say everyone. My teammates down to the coaches, everyone knows what I'm capable of. They help me out with that. They help me with my confidence a lot. I also know what I'm capable of as well. I just go out there and produce for my team. I know what they're looking for me to do, which is be aggressive, find my shot, but also facilitate.

Q. This is the first time, I think, since 2008/9 since Charlotte's been in the tournament. What are you anticipating from the environment tomorrow night, particularly with the home court advantage for Indiana?

OCTAVIA JETT-WILSON: I would say that this is no different than any other game. We've been playing really well on the road. So for us, it's probably a good thing. We know it's going to be loud, but there's nothing that we haven't seen before.

Off of previous games, like we played West Virginia, it was loud in the gym. The atmosphere there, it was everybody was West Virginia fans there, but I don't think that startled us. It never rattled us. We never get rattled by things like that. We always come together as a team, and we put our backs against, it's us against everybody at the end of the day.

Just us having that mentality all the time. We're very, we're not going to back down for nothing. It doesn't matter whose home court we're on.

THE MODERATOR: Welcome back again. We're now joined by Charlotte head coach Cara Consuegra. You want to start with an opening statement, and then we'll take questions.

CARA CONSUEGRA: I think my student-athletes kind of hit it on the head. We're really excited to be here, excited for the opportunity. It's been a long time coming for Charlotte women's basketball. We've worked really hard to get to this moment. Nothing was handed to us. We had to earn it. We had to go through a really difficult schedule. We had to win some very difficult games, overtime games, close games.

We've been through a lot on this road, and part of our program, our values is to play with heart, and part of heart is to celebrate each other and what we've accomplished. We certainly feel like we have accomplished a lot to be here.

At the same time, though, we are here to compete. So I think we've had a really great balance of, again, celebrating what we have accomplished as a team, as individuals, and as we've gone through this journey, but also know that we have earned the right to be here. We have prepared well, and we're a really good team.

We're going to play a really good team in Indiana. They are outstanding. Everything that we've seen on them on film, everything we've done to prepare, we know it's a tall task ahead of us, but great teams do hard things. So we're here to compete. We're here to do hard things, and we're looking forward to the opportunity to play tomorrow.

Q. Obviously, this is your first time coaching in the NCAA Tournament, but what has it been like for you and the coaching staff making sure the team is grounded and not getting caught up in the bright lights of what it's going to be like tomorrow night?

CARA CONSUEGRA: I think for us it all comes down to who we are every single day. Again, our program is built around core values of heart. While we do celebrate each other and rightfully celebrated our conference championships. We won the regular season and tournament championship for the first time in the history of our program, and that means a lot to us, of course. It should. You should take time to celebrate those things.

We're also a program that really focuses on the process and not necessarily the outcome. So every day is very similar for us. We talk about getting better every day. We talk about growing in particular areas, each day, each week, and that's been no different this week. We celebrated our conference championship, and then we got back to work.

I think that's a big credit to our players who believe in that, big credit to our veterans, who you guys saw up here. They have been outstanding in terms of leading us. When we got back to work this week, we maybe had the best practice that we've had all year. Again, that's a credit to our veterans who understand when it is time to celebrate and enjoy and when it is time to work. Right now it's time to work.

Q. Good afternoon. You threw a lot at your team early, as you mentioned, and there were some struggle points. Was there a moment, whether it was in a game or in a practice or anything, where you started to see that kind of manifest itself into the toughness that you showed throughout probably more than the second half of the season through the conference tournament?

CARA CONSUEGRA: Yeah, I remember our nonconference was really difficult. We had some tough games. We had some close games, and we just weren't able to finish. I remember when we played at -- I think it was West Virginia, and we had lost. I told the team I didn't think we were going to lose very many more games because I could see that we were improving. It might have been hard for them to see, but I could see it, and I knew we were growing.

I told them we weren't going to lose very many more games. Well, then, we turn around and lose to Davidson at home, which we shouldn't have lost that game. We didn't play well. But I think for us that honestly was the turning point. We had a really tough conversation after that game, and we had to make a decision at that point. Were we going to be the team that was just going to battle and lose, or were we going to turn the corner and really buy in?

After that game, we all went home for Christmas. We came back. We had to go through a COVID pause, which just added onto some of the obstacles we faced. After we came out of that COVID pause, we were a different team. I thought everybody really started to get on board.

We had to go open up on the road at UTEP, which is a difficult place to play in our league. The hardest road swing of the season, one of the best fan bases in Conference USA, and we went out, and we played well. I think that's when you could start to see that our team believed in themselves. They believed in what I had been telling them, that we were going to be good. We didn't lose very many games after that.

So I would say that's really when it started to turn from us, for us, and once our confidence started to build, you could see what type of a team we were capable of being and we became.

Q. I was just wondering what you saw this week from film from Indiana, particularly in a player like Grace Berger, the guard for Indiana. What did you see from her specifically and other players that make it a handful for your team tomorrow?

CARA CONSUEGRA: As I said earlier, I think Indiana's really good. I think what makes them so good is there are not a lot of weak points, particularly among their starting five, for all starters to be in double figure scoring.

I think just from my observation, they do what they do really well. To me, that's a credit to a great team. When teams go out and they know their roles and they know what they're supposed to do, that's what they do really well. I think Berger does that really well. She doesn't try to be somebody else. She knows what she's good at. She's excellent at getting herself that mid-range jumper, but she's also a great facilitator for the team.

So I think certainly she's going to be a tough task, but they're all really good. They know how to play their roles. They're a great team. It's going to be a difficult task, but we've done a lot of difficult things this year.