NCAA WOMEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP: FIRST ROUND - MERCER VS UCONN

March 19, 2022

Susie Gardner

Shannon Titus

Jaron Dougherty

Mercer Bears

Media Conference

Uconn 83, Mercer 38

THE MODERATOR: We'll start with opening remarks.

SUSIE GARDNER: Well, it's been a long time since we've lost. We won 12 games in a row. The last time we lost was January the 20th and you kind of forget what that feels like.

What's tough about this time of year, as wonderful as March Madness is, last Sunday 68 teams were thrilled, excited, top of the world, and then all of a sudden at the end of this tournament there's going to be 67 sad teams and coaches. That's what's tough about this because it is such an emotional roller coaster.

But I'm so proud of our team. We won a regular season championship. We won a tournament championship. And not many teams in the country do that every year. So really proud of them. Unfortunately we had worst case scenario that could have happened when Amoria Neal-Tysor went down, our starting point guard, our leading scorer.

We prepared really hard all week. We knew how good UConn is, but you don't prepare to have your starting point guard and the player that's going to play 40 minutes go down in the second quarter.

And I'm not saying that would have changed the outcome of the game but it might have changed the margin.

THE MODERATOR: Questions for the student athletes.

Q. Jaron, could you talk about the third quarter. It seemed you guys didn't score in that quarter. What was it about it that? Was their defensive intensity or what do you remember about that 10 minutes?

JARON DOUGHERTY: Well, UConn's a great team. They do pride their self in playing great defense and putting pressure. And we did struggle to score in that quarter, as the score shows, but we do trust our coaches and we were just trying to follow our game plan to the best we could.

Q. Shannon, for you, actually. There's a legacy that's been built here at Mercer of getting to the tournament consistently, of excellence. I'm just wondering if you had a chance to reflect on your role in that and thinking about being a building block and creating something that seems really sustainable.

SHANNON TITUS: My season just ended and I haven't really had time to reflect a lot, but I'm so proud of this team and what we've accomplished just this year alone.

And then what I've been through with Coach Gardner, I think it's just amazing, something I'll never forget.

Q. Coach mentioned it's really hard to adjust, even if you have weeks, to lose your best player and your point guard. It seemed to me that you guys looked like you just stepped into what had to be done. How did you do that mentally? Because you lose that player, you could see it in UConn's season when they lost that player, they were pretty terrible for a couple of games. You guys seemed to not lose much of the intensity even though you had a crummy third quarter.

JARON DOUGHERTY: Well, I think every day in practice we just put trust in each other and we can trust that anyone can step up in any given moment. So just pushing that into each and every player that we have is that we trust them and they all can perform.

SHANNON TITUS: I think it was hard losing Amoria, but because of that it made us trust each other more and just count on each other. Next one up. Now someone else has to step up now.

THE MODERATOR: All right. Thank you, ladies. We'll take questions for coach.

Q. After Amoria went down, your freshmen kind of came in to run the point and you guys ended up with 38 points. In the last eight games UConn has averaged, their opponents have averaged 40. So without your best player you guys still got close to that. What does that say to you about this team and their strength?

SUSIE GARDNER: You know, I love your question right now because I needed a glass half full question like that. Appreciate that.

What's crazy is Amoria was not supposed to be our starting point guard. We lost our starting point guard the third game of the season. So Amoria had to go in that role, which is why our depth at that position was a little bit less.

And then having Erin Houpt, our freshman, that's a tough call for her to have to do being a freshman and the magnitude of playing against UConn. I mean, she was guarding Bueckers and I was just imagining her. I'm like, oh, my gosh, what is going through her head?

But I think sometimes when tough things like that happen, I mean, it did, it shook us. I mean, we were unable to run a lot of our plays that we normally run because Erin and Endia don't really have a large vocabulary in terms of what they can run.

But I felt like Erin did pretty well. What it did, though, was it took her out of position to get open for her threes because she then had to handle the ball. And that third quarter really absolutely it was just it was a nightmare because, we didn't play awful the first half, but we didn't really handle the third quarter at all.

And I think what UConn did was they amped up their, their defense was amazing. Their press was great. We had three turnovers in a row that killed us. But a lot of credit to Erin and the rest of the players. We had to just try to buckle in. And then they started hitting threes, and that's what kind of got us.

But proud of 'em. I mean, it's, I hate to look at the score, but at the end of the day I think we played as hard as we could.

Q. The first is just, you guys this year were 11th in the nation in defensive rating in terms of points per possession, 13th in terms of threes, and Erin was a big part of that. She's your first ever 40 percent three-point shooter in the time at Mercer. So I wonder whether you think that is sort of the next evolution with this team that consistently gets to the NCAA tournament, is it a question of finding a way to have the offense match the defense?

SUSIE GARDNER: Honestly, if you -- and there would be no reason for you to, but if you knew the history of our program and my previous teams that went to the NCAA tournament, we're a very potent offensive team. Very potent. I had the point guard that led the country in assist-to-turnover ratio, like, led them.

So I'm more used to having a potent offense. We just didn't have, honestly, I mean, we didn't, like Shannon's a great defensive player, but scoring is not necessarily what she should be -- she should not be leading our team in scoring, if that makes sense.

So honestly, what we're going to do is we're just going to go out there and try to recruit a little bit taller players because our problem today with UConn was they were five-eleven, five-eleven, and five-eleven and if we want to advance and not just win the So Con if we want to advance, we've got to have those players that can match the size of at least the guards.

But I think this year defense was more out of necessity because I love coaching offense. We just didn't have as many, Erin was someone that we weren't sure how good she was going to be and she could fill it up. But we just didn't have enough people around her that -- we don't have a low post presence. We don't have scorers in the low block.

So that's something that we need to address as well with recruiting. But we're just going to keep recruiting the best players we can and hopefully at some point we'll get a seed that makes sense that we can perhaps upset somebody.

Q. For Erin specifically obviously it's born of necessity, but there's a spot, Paige deflected it, got a run out, you called timeout, come over with your hand like this. What are you saying to Erin No. 1 and No. 2 how significant is it to be able to have teaching moments like this here at Gampel with a freshman?

SUSIE GARDNER: I probably coached Erin as hard as anybody on the whole team this year. I had the seniors and the super seniors and the transfers, but Erin was that freshman that I felt like needed a little bit more Susie Gardner love and she would not think it was love. But what I told her it was because we practiced against high intensity defense in practice, not the same as today, but Erin was not meeting her pass in practice and a player on our team got it and we said, hey look -- and I demonstrated. I said, Okay, you meet the ball, if you meet your pass I will go through you and I'll foul you. And I'll demonstrate it, like I was on defense.

So that was the moment that happened. I said, What did we tell you in practice? Meet your pass, and Paige would have fouled you. So it's just, I mean I'm always nitpicking on something, but that's what that moment was. I remember it specifically.

Q. What the nature of the injury was to her elbow or shoulder?

SUSIE GARDNER: It was her shoulder or, I mean, I said the word that you just said. It was her elbow. I think she maybe landed on it. We'll have to wait to see when we get home to our team doctors to take X-rays down there. But I don't know the seriousness of it. I know that Amoria's tough and I don't usually walk on the floor, but when she can't get up, I'm like, this might be bad. So I decided just to check it out and of course when she said, Don't touch it, to our trainer, I'm like, okay, my heart dropped to my stomach. But she's tough and we'll pray for the best honestly, but it was a tough blow, for sure.

Q. You said something yesterday that stuck with me a little bit and you were talking about the history of Mercer being multiple times in the AAIW tournament and there's, we're looking at 50 years of legacy since Title IX, even your teams in Georgia obviously as the precursor of for what Joni Keller is doing down there. How much do you think it matters that we see the early powers in women's basketball continue to assert themselves as this history builds upon himself?

SUSIE GARDNER: I was recruited out of high school right around the time when it was shifting over. I was at Georgia 1982, so that was right when the NCAA tournament started for us. And I think because I grew up during that time that it was shifting, I'm probably a little bit more appreciative and understanding and growing up and I'm from Tennessee so I grew up in Tennessee, so I really know the UT Chattanoogas and those kind of guys.

I know the history pretty well. It's exciting for me and that's why I brought that up yesterday was, because my SWA happened to be on that team and I respect her so much and what she's done for me. And I do wish that our players -- I think you asked that question -- I don't think they study it as much as we do. So I wanted to bring it out to the forefront and let them know. And I always try to make sure that our players understand that when we have alumni day and those players come back for that particular game I always want to make sure that they understand that, hey we would not have all the things we have without that group. I even put out a tweet this morning before we left the hotel about thanking the players that wore the orange and black before us for this opportunity.

So I'm very thankful I think because maybe I lived on the cusp of it, but I hope that more of these teams, I hope we can stay what we're doing, I really do, but I'm appreciative of it and thank you for asking.

Q. Sorry to be glass half empty, I was wondering that third quarter you said was a nightmare. Was there any one particular thing or that they did that was nightmarish or one particular player or just the combined intensity that they played?

SUSIE GARDNER: I think it was interesting when I was checking on Amoria, which I promise you I never go on the court, as I walked past Coach Auriemma's huddle, I was not eavesdropping, but I feel like I heard him say, Every time you get a tip it needs to be a layup. So in my mind I'm thinking, okay, he's going to amp up the pressure, which he did, they were running three people at the ball, they're so long, they were getting tips, we had those three turnovers in a row, they were getting layups. We went in at halftime and we talked about -- I think it was they had 18 points off of turnovers and they had 12 points off of offensive rebounds for a total of 30 points. And they only had like 43 points I believe at half.

So only 13 of those points were from a set, not transition offense and not offensive rebounds.

So if you take those out of the equation -- but then they, then again, I feel like it was the press that got us and then we just, we weren't hitting shots and I feel like part of it is we were rushing shots, we're not used to that length, we weren't hitting, sometimes unfortunately that's contagious when you're not hitting, when you are hitting it's also contagious. So it was just a total effort of misery. (Laughing).