NCAA WOMEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP: FIRST ROUND - ALABAMA VS BAYLOR

March 18, 2023

Nicki Collen

Ja'Mee Asberry

Sarah Andrews

Gampel Pavilion

Baylor Bears

Media Conference

Baylor - 78, Alabama - 74

THE MODERATOR: We are joined by head coach Nicki Collen, along with student-athletes Ja'Mee Asberry and Sarah Andrews. We'll begin with an opening statement by the head coach followed by questions to the student-athletes.

NICKI COLLEN: Wow, we were really bad in the first quarter and really good after that. I think they came out punching.

I will say this, having coached in the SEC before, it's an athletic, physical league, and I thought they came out and they were more physical than us. They were playing downhill. Then of course hitting threes.

And I thought we got good shots, but we were making one pass, and they were taking us out of some of our actions because of their physicality on pin downs.

We had to respond. Amazingly, I thought we started to respond as the first quarter went on, just the ball didn't go through the basket. Then I think the second quarter Ja'Mee made some shots and kind of took the lid off, and we started to almost exchange baskets. But I thought that gave us a little energy.

But it was going to come down to we can't trade baskets at this point. We put ourselves in too big a hole. So there wasn't a lot of Xs and Os in the halftime locker room. It was we're getting punked and we have to step up. We've got to compete. We got to get stops. It's time to do what we need to do to really be focused.

There wasn't anything -- when you have five days of prep, I didn't run anything we hadn't worked on. It was guarding it correctly. It was being there on the catch. And then getting paint touches for us, which I thought, as the game went along, we did and executed down the stretch enough to make our free throws and put it away.

THE MODERATOR: We will now take questions for the student-athletes.

Q. Sarah, you lived up to your promise to come in hooping and hollering. Obviously it's 22-4. Nicki mentioned it, but what turned around for you guys, and how good does it feel to pull out a win like this?

SARAH ANDREWS: I just kept saying we've got to stick together, you know. They hit shots -- I felt like everything they shot was going in for them. We just stuck together, and we knew sooner or later we were going to knock down shots.

Most of all, it wasn't about trading baskets. It was about us playing defense.

Q. For either of you, that was tied for the third largest comeback win in NCAA Tournament history. It's one thing to say you can believe that you guys can do it, but to actually do it, I guess, what were you able to say to each other or hear from Coach to make sure that you could make that happen and also execute down the stretch of the fourth quarter?

JA'MEE ASBERRY: I think, like Sarah said, we just stayed together. I think our team is really good at doing that, staying positive.

You know, you see teams sometimes like kind of getting it, and we don't. We let our coach get onto the players because we're not the coaches. I think that when Coach Nicki gets on someone, we go outside the huddle and say, you're good because if you feel like so many people is on your back, you're not going to play good.

So let one person get onto you, and let the other four give you positivity. That's how I look at it.

Q. The team was, I think, 14 of 18 from the line. I think it was 9 of 10 in the fourth quarter. Obviously seven in a row to close the game out. Can you just talk about what leads to that kind of composure, especially when it's coming down to the end in an NCAA Tournament game?

JA'MEE ASBERRY: I think I'm the one who missed. So -- (laughter). I did, but it could have been more.

I think it was important I shot a lot of free throws before I left. So I think that's important.

SARAH ANDREWS: Tell them you prayed on one of them.

JA'MEE ASBERRY: No, I did pray. I was asking God, like please go in, please.

Q. Ja'Mee, what got you going in that second quarter when you all were 2 for 16 in the first quarter?

JA'MEE ASBERRY: What got me going internally, my mom's birthday was March 16th, and some of you may not know that she passed away when I was 16. And my dad sent me a text on her birthday, I think, and it was like make this game about her.

When I was at halftime, I was just sitting there, and I was just quiet, and I was just praying to her like let me -- if I'm going to go out, let me go out with a bang. Thankfully we won, and I think that that game's for her.

Q. Sarah, all week long you guys worked on defending the three-point line. You knew Alabama's strength was threes so kind of beat them at their own game. I mean, you guys hit some big threes. Just how satisfying does that feel?

SARAH ANDREWS: It feels good. We shot the ball very well after the first quarter, but most of all, I think you saw some big plays. Ja'Mee and Caitlin and Bella all had some big plays at the end of the game that we could have easily gave up and gave them the rebound.

But I think our seniors stepped up, and Bella definitely as a freshman got a big rebound for us.

Q. Sarah, I can't remember if you were on her some, but you all really shut down Aaliyah Nye. It didn't look like you all were giving her any open looks. You were up on her. Talk about how you all did that.

SARAH ANDREWS: We're a team. We feed off of our defense. When we're able to get stops and rebounds, we're a great team in transition. So we started playing some defense and getting stops.

I was just like today on defense, I was just locked in. I felt like I could jump out of the gym all of a sudden. Most of all, the game was just fun today honestly.

NICKI COLLEN: Block machine. They were legit. Guards usually get strips for blocks, not like the ones up top.

THE MODERATOR: Now we will open up the questions for our head coach.

Q. Nicki, kind of a two-parter. Bella's rebound there at the end, huge. And you know, obviously you've seen Buggs out there a lot of times in those kinds of situations. Just the decision to kind of go with Bella instead of Buggs.

NICKI COLLEN: Yeah, it was a little bit gut-based. I thought that Bella spaced the floor better. She'd made a couple threes. I thought Buggs was pressing around the rim, you know, when they were playing off of her, kind of deciding she was going into congestion a lot. She'd given up a three, at one point getting too deep.

It was gut. I just think it was a gut instinct at that point, the physicality. Buggs has had an unbelievable year, and I thought that, when I went to Buggs early, she gave us a lot of energy, which she always does. But I thought Bella ran the floor.

Buggs is always going to rebound, but Bella's offensive rebound -- but not just her offensive rebound, like she hasn't been our best free-throw shooter this year. She's not a bad free-throw shooter, but to make the two to get us within one late on the hold on the baseline out of bounds -- I'm sure they're questioning why the heck?

I thought we bothered Nye all night, and that was a frustration foul late, but you can't do that in that situation because now you're putting our best foul shooter on the line to take the lead.

So just thought down the stretch for Bella to hit her two and then to turn around and for Cait to hit her two was the difference. When you look at the game and the 14 threes on both sides, if you'd have told me they were going to make 14 threes today and we would win, I would tell you you're crazy.

I thought -- you know, I probably should have said this in my open. If that's Brittany Davis' last game, holy cow, she was fantastic. Like there were times when we made mistakes on her, and there were times when we were right there and she just, she was better than us one-on-one. But she just, her efficiency, 33 points on 16 shots is insane. So she was unbelievable.

But I'll tell you, we felt like -- Derek, our radio guy, asked me this before the game. I felt like we had a better chance to guard Barber and Nye than we did to guard Davis. So that's why we put Sarah on Nye. That's why we put Ja'Mee on Barber because we wanted to keep tight on them. We really wanted to make -- we thought we had a better chance on them than we did on Davis, and she kind of proved why.

To hold those two in single figures -- but one of the things I'm most proud of is, when we gave up the three-point play late, when you're at a minute, it's easy to go, man, that was the one. That was the one. And we weren't going to try to tie it up with a three, like we were playing downhill when they hand checked us.

So we finished the game like we needed to, even getting the ball inbounds in late game situations. We've been in a lot of close games, but Caitlin Bickle's been sitting next to my coaches on the bench. So to have her inbound the ball gives me -- especially with no timeouts.

Most of you won't know that we lost a game with me probably not calling a timeout when we needed to against OU. With only one left, I really questioned whether I wanted to use that last one to advance, but I was having flashbacks to the turnover and the three by Taylor Robinson. So we needed to be safe there.

I know that was a really long answer to why Bella then Buggs, but I did remember what the question was. It was gut. You know, you make a lot of coaching decisions based on gut. Gut and flow of the game.

Q. Can you talk about your team's defense, especially that last minute? And then the offensive rebound by Fontleroy off the missed foul shot and the composure of your team over that last minute.

NICKI COLLEN: I don't know that anyone's going to say giving up 49 percent and 54 percent from three and 90 percent from the line is good defense. But I thought we were scrappy and we started to turn them over, and I think that was a huge part.

We got some live ball turnovers. We were able to get in transition. We made some plays on the roll. Like we just -- we started the game, and our ball screen coverage was as bad as it's been. It got better. It got better as the game went along. They had to make tougher shots.

We got some shot clock violations or near shot clock violations where they had to throw shots up at the basket. And believe me, I felt a little bit in the first quarter, I'm sure like Kristy did in the third, where she's like zone, we hit a three. She goes back man, we score. She goes back zone. It's the worst feeling to me in coaching, and I know there's a lot of offensive coaches out there that love shootouts. But it makes me super uncomfortable when we don't get stops because you feel like that's like the one thing --

Well, I told my team this week that defense and rebounding travels. I guess offense ultimately traveled here today. But I just thought we made some plays, we forced a travel. I thought there was a couple that could have been called back. Just because we were there, we were really tight on the catch.

I thought Ja'Mee's defense on Barber late was really good. She got over screens. I thought even one possession we switched matchups and put Bella on Barber so that we could switch the high ball screen so that they couldn't roll behind us. And even that for one possession made a difference because they couldn't roll behind us.

So I thought Tony made a really good adjustment on that as well.

Q. Nicki, how did you see your team, especially after the first quarter, going down, only scoring four points in the first frame, just stick together, not lose that sense of we can actually chip into this?

NICKI COLLEN: We had a lot of players out there that either haven't played in a game like this or haven't played the role that they're playing in a game like this. So I felt like we started the game -- and once again, their physicality took us out of -- you know, their ice bothered us in our ball screen stuff. We worked on going against their ice all week. I thought they'd switch one through four. I thought they'd ice with their five. But they were icing with their four to start. So they were consistently putting us against the ice. We weren't moving the ball side to side the first four to five minutes.

When we got to the first media timeout, we started to move the ball. Then we just started missing. I thought we ran a good set, Buggs got a layup and missed. Ja'Mee got a couple of wide open threes. We just knew we had to get the ball side to side. For us, everything we do is predicated on do we get a paint touch. We've got to get it off a bounce, a cut. We're not a low post, throw it in there and play off the low post.

I think even at halftime we were over 50 percent with the paint touch. We were at like, I don't know, minus 14 percent without a paint touch. So for us, it was about, I think, seeing the ball go through the basket, because when we got the ball moved side to side, because they were switching off ball one through four, when we cut hard, we'd take two with the cut.

And Ja'Mee was standing there wide open at times. So I thought she started to see the ball go in. Then Bella hit a couple threes, and so all of a sudden you feel like, okay, they took a deep breath.

Now, we didn't guard perfectly in the second quarter, but we started to chip away. To go in down 11 -- I thought we had a couple possessions right there at the end to cut it under 10 and had a turnover and an embarrassing out of bounds play to end the half. Those are always like really bad coaching moments.

But the halftime, everyone is always going to talk about the halftime speech, but for me sometimes I black out when I give those kind of halftime speeches. It sounds weird to say that, but I'm very much a pretty articulate, pretty like, okay, we didn't guard this action right. Let's fix how we guard their pistol stuff. But we guarded everything wrong, and we'd had five days to prepare.

So there wasn't anything we hadn't taught them how to guard. We just had to do what we were taught to do. So there was a lot of challenges being thrown out. No swear words. I gave those up for Lent. But a lot of challenges thrown out about how we needed to compete.

Like I thought Brittany Davis came out, and I challenged Jaden, like you have to be better. Like you just have to be better. So I don't know exactly what I said. I know Chloe and Tony loved it. But I could tell you that I don't -- it's kind of like in those moments when it's so emotional and it's so like all you're trying to do is get them to go out there and compete because I felt like we could get anything we wanted on offense, but we had to guard. We had to defend and rebound.

And we did. Our challenge to them was make them call the first timeout of the third quarter, and we did. And then they had to call a second, which puts you in a situation at the end where they only have two left and they don't have one where maybe they need one there at the end. So that was our challenge to them, make them call the first timeout, and I thought we did. Well, we obviously did, but I thought we came out with the kind of energy that we needed.

Q. Nicki, you talked about it. Brittany obviously got hers, but Aaliyah and Hannah, I mean you guarded -- what specifically did you do on those two?

NICKI COLLEN: We played tight, you know. We still tried to be in help side, but we just -- look, we have so many resources. The beauty of Baylor and a lot of Power Five schools is we've got services, we've got film. There's nothing we lack when it comes to preparation, and I know we face a lot of teams in these tournaments with the same thing. But there's no reason to not know what people are good at.

Nye is an incredible catch-and-shoot three-point shooter. She was 2 for 3, so when you give her a look -- now, one of them banked in, but she was 2 for 3, but she has made no threes off the bounce. So if you make her play off the dribble -- I think she has like 11 free throws on the season, and it's layups or it's threes. She's so good at creating protection for everybody else because you don't want to leave her, and it puts you in situations where you've got to stay home.

But we did a good job of being there on the catch all night long on her and making her play off the bounce, making her a passer, trying to make her a decision-maker. She had no turnovers. But we felt like we could disrupt her and just not let her get shots off.

Then Barber is so steady. She's got some Emily Ryan in her. She's a kid that is a good decision-maker off the bounce. Like she'll read it. If you go under, she'll shoot it. We just didn't want to get caught on screens. We wanted to stay on her hip and make her a passer but not make her -- we wanted to play the bounce pass on the roll. We wanted to play, we call it the sling pass, because they do a good job in their three-player action of rising and hitting the pass behind for the shot.

We wanted to sit on those two passes. We wanted the guard to sit on the sling pass. We wanted the post to sit on the pocket pass. And we got better as the game went along at doing that.