NCAA WOMEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP: FIRST FOUR - MONMOUTH VS TENNESSEE TECH

March 15, 2023

Kim Rosamond

Tennessee Tech Red Raiders

Media Conference

THE MODERATOR: Coach, welcome to March Madness. If you could, please make an opening statement, and then we'll take questions from the room.

KIM ROSAMOND: Very excited and humbled to be here, excited about tomorrow night and our matchup with Monmouth and have tremendous respect for Coach Boggess and what she has done in a very short time with that program. They played extremely well in their conference tournament, won four games to get here, just like we did. We won three games to get here. So I think you're going to see a great matchup tomorrow night, two teams that play really hard that love each other and have a great connection on the court. So excited for tip-off at 9 p.m. tomorrow. Can't get here fast enough.

THE MODERATOR: Questions from the room, please.

Q. Kim, I'll ask you what I asked the players. What makes this team special?

KIM ROSAMOND: Well, I'm going to use a word that is thrown around probably way too much in college athletics, but it's not just a word that we throw around. It's something we live by, and that's our culture, and we've been building this culture for seven years now, and it is -- it's something that we live every single day. It's called our SOAR culture. We serve others. We own it. We don't whine. We don't complain. We don't make excuses. We acquire knowledge on the court, off the court. It's not just about basketball. It's about trying to help these young women prepare for life, and then we respond positive. We've had to use every bit of that this year.

I was reminded after -- our season turned on February the 11th. That was a turning point in our season when we lost at TSU. We gave up, I think, 82 points at TSU, and we had to use -- we had to use all of those things to get it back on track. But that's when your culture comes into play is not during the good times. It's when things get hard. And you have to dig down, and it hadn't maybe gone -- we were picked. We were picked to win it, you know, coming into the season. And that's a pressure and an expectation that this team hadn't had yet, and we were learning how to deal with those expectations.

But to our players' credit and to our staff's credit, we lived that culture out even when it got hard, and I will also say this. After that loss on February the 11th, I learned a long time ago you better surround yourself with people that are a lot smarter than you are, and I have an unbelievable staff. Allison Clark and Melanie Walls have been with me from day one, 2016, and we walked in that staff meeting that day, and Melanie Walls, she and I were assistants together at Middle and won two championships there, and she said, Coach, we gotta make a change. We need to start pressing. And since then -- you know, that was -- you know, I worked for Melanie Balcomb for nine years, learned so much from her, but we didn't press a lot because we were shooters, and we shot the ball well and we didn't -- kind of a philosophy thing. We didn't really want to wear our kids out. So that was what I've always veered to, but we needed to make a change with our team, and it has completely changed our season. We won seven straight since then. And I want to make sure I credit my staff. You know, that was Coach Walls made a great suggestion. Coach Clark has helped us install that press. Coach Walls has kind of been the architect behind it. And Coach Jasmine Cincore has done a great job of getting us better with our rebounding. And our director of operations, Brianna Ellis. It's only four of us, but we are connected, and we are fierce, and we don't back down from anybody, and I think our team has taken on our staff's personality.

Q. That's awesome. That's really awesome. So you lose at Tennessee State. What was your mindset and goals? What did you think you could accomplish with the remainder of your conference play?

KIM ROSAMOND: Well, we were really -- we had been really good at times, but we had also been really inconsistent. And we had struggled guarding the basketball. And when we allowed the basketball to get to the paint, which we were doing -- we weren't guarding it consistently well. It was why we lost at Morehead, because we struggled guarding the basketball. And then because of that, we couldn't rebound. And that was the same thing that happened at TSU. We didn't do a good job guarding the basketball, and then we just got killed on the offensive boards.

So when we went to pressing, first of all, it changed our mindset. We got aggressive, and our kids just bought into it. And then it shortened the shot clock, and so we weren't having to guard in the half court quite as much. And then we weren't having to get in those rotation situations quite as much. So we got better on the basketball. Our rebounding got tremendously better. We started getting more stops, which put us in transition. And this basketball team is really good in transition. This is the most athletic team we've had. This is the fastest team we've had. It's not the biggest, but it is the most athletic, and it put our players in a position to really play at their strengths. When you've got Jada Guinn with the ball in her hands in that open court, and you've got our post players that maybe aren't the biggest in Anna Walker and Kiera Hill, Reghan Grimes sometimes at the 5, running the middle of the lane, and you've got our shooters, Maaliya Owens, Peyton Carter, Jordan Brock, Ansley Hall, all those kids that can sprint the floor, spread the court, we are really, really tough to guard in transition. So I think it allowed us to start playing better to our strengths.

Q. So you go into conference play. You lost to Little Rock in the regular season. What did you do different to adjust or get your kids to buy into?

KIM ROSAMOND: Well, we lost to them twice, and the first time in January when we went to Little Rock, I mean we just got manhandled. They were much more physical than us. They were much more aggressive than us. I lost my composure, and then in turn, our team lost their composure. But after that game that night, you know, I went in the locker room, and I told our players, it wasn't on them. It was on me. And you know, I said we'll learn from this. We're not going to hang our heads. We're going to get better. We had to turn around in less than a 36-hour period and play a very good SEMO team on the road. That was a really big win the next day. Then in less than six days, we turned around and played Little Rock again at home. And in that first half you didn't see a whole lot of a change. We didn't respond to their physicality, to their athleticism very well. We made some adjustments at halftime, and then in the second half you saw a little bit of a break-through. We scored 26 points in the third quarter. I think that was the most points that Little Rock had given up the entire year. And while we didn't win the game, we won a lot of confidence that day. We lost on the last possession that day. And we knew if we were fortunate enough to get a shot at them, you know, we thought we had the right formula and our kids were a lot more confident. Now, we had to beat two very good teams to get there, in SIUE and EIU, who had started the year, I want to say they started conference play I think they were 11 and 0 until Little Rock got them. So we had to beat two very good teams to get there, and I just have tremendous respect for Joe Foley. He's going to be in the College Basketball Hall of Fame. There's no doubt. But it's -- I mean, our kids, you can put together the best game plan there is. And Coach Allison Clark did that last Saturday. But if those kids don't execute it, don't believe in it, and then make it work, doesn't matter how good your game plan is, and I gotta credit our players. Our players executed our game plan almost to perfection. And if you would have told me at any point in this year, much less in January, that we would have won an OVC championship and we would go 0 for 6 from the three-point line, I would have said you were crazy, because at one point we were living and dying by the three. But that is a credit to the maturity, to the leadership. And you just saw the leadership up here before me in Maaliya Owens and Jada Guinn, and we've got several other great players, but to watch how those young women have grown through the year, how their toughness has grown through the year, I'm not only a proud coach, but I'm like a proud momma.

Q. I bet. Okay. So walk us through your journey as a coach for the Eagles. Why did you come to Tech? What was your vision for the program?

KIM ROSAMOND: I appreciate that question because I was about 75 miles down the road for nine years at Vanderbilt. I was fortunate enough to work for Melanie Balcomb. We won an SEC Championship, went to two Sweet 16s, seven NCAA tournaments, and I was at a place where you could combine the best of both worlds, in academics and athletics. And so I wasn't necessarily looking to be a head coach, but I knew if I ever tried it, I wanted to go somewhere where you did, you had the best of both worlds, and you went to a place where women's basketball mattered. And the year before the job came open, the year before Coach Davis retired, I'd come up to watch the Tennessee Tech men's basketball practice and Coach Allison Clark was actually on staff and took me around and showed me the Hooper Eblen Center and what Mark Wilson and his staff had done, the investment they had made. I knew it was a place we could win. It had been done before. It hadn't been done consistently in a very long time. It's been 23 years since Tennessee Tech was in the NCAA Tournament, which is almost unheard of, right? You're talking about we had our one thousandth program win in January. Only 21 teams at the time in NCAA history have done that. So Marynell Meadors, what she started, what Bill Worrell continued at Tennessee Tech, it was why I wanted to be here.

The commitment from Mark Wilson and the athletic program -- Coach Frank Harrell is in here today, and those two guys, along with Dr. Odom, hired me and believed in me. And it is a place where women's basketball matters, and it is why I knew we could get it back. It's been a process, and we've been here seven years, and as Maaliya so eloquently said, we have not skipped a step in that process, and sometimes we've hit the same step twice. But it's all been worth it. And it just makes it even that much more rewarding.

Q. Well, I will tell you, I have been on the losing end of a lot of Tennessee Tech games as a player. So I have a tremendous amount of respect for your history, your program and what you've done. So congratulations for being here.

KIM ROSAMOND: Thank you, Holly.

Q. You alluded to the roles as you get up and down the court and what you're doing. Can you kind of, especially with Maaliya and Jada Guinn, kind of describe what makes them special as far as players on the court, their skills, their strengths, what really makes them special?

KIM ROSAMOND: Well, first of all, what they have done since we got into conference play, and especially down the stretch, you know, you've gotta get buy-in, but you've also gotta get all in. And they have been -- and you gotta have your seniors. You have to have your seniors be all in. And Jada, Maaliya, Dana Joy McFarlane, who maybe has not played as much, but has been an unbelievable teammate and has helped us get here, and Jordan Brock, who came back for her sixth year -- what a great story -- those kids are all in. But Jada and Mo have put us on their backs the last month. Jada is -- she's the best point guard in the OVC, and I was very disappointed that she wasn't named to the first team, along with Maaliya, who 100 percent deserved to be on the first team. But I thought Jada handled it so well, and then to be able to be named MVP of the conference tournament. When we needed a big bucket down the stretch, that kid just went and got it.

And then Maaliya Owens, to see the year that she has had, all you all look at her stats, I mean, the way she has shot the basketball has been incredible. She came here as a great shooter. She's become a great player, and she has worked and worked and worked to become a complete player on both ends of the floor. And she's done that. And what has been awesome about the last four games for her, maybe it hadn't gone in the bucket as much, but I hadn't been able to take that kid off the floor because she's our ball stopper. She's made plays off the basketball. She's made plays with the basketball, whether the ball has gone in the hole or not, and they have led like you would want your two all-conference seniors to lead.

MODERATOR: Coach, thank you so much for your time.