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SOUTHEASTERN CONFERENCE WOMEN'S TOURNAMENTMarch 3, 2006Carol RossNORTH LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS THE MODERATOR: From the University of Mississippi, Coach Carol Ross, Ashley Johnson and Armintie Price. Coach Ross, if you would open with a statement. COACH CAROL ROSS: Well, a lot can change in 24 hours. You know, unfortunately, LSU is obviously a talented, very explosive team with two outstanding players, about four or five others that aren't real bad. When you play teams that are better than you on paper, maybe better than you in a lot of areas, you have to find ways to take their strength away. If you pick up the stat sheet, you will see that their strengths all along were their strengths again today. They got big games out of Augustus and Fowles and they just killed us on the boards. If you get out rebounded by 23, it really doesn't matter who you play, you're going to get beat. If you play a team like LSU, they're going to beat you pretty bad. You know, so that's, I guess, the game in a nutshell. They played to their strengths, and we didn't get to play to ours. THE MODERATOR: We'll take questions. Q. What do you think about Augustus as a player? COACH CAROL ROSS: Well, the best thing about her is she's a senior. After that, she's not a bad offensive player either. She's one of the most -- she's graceful and she's poised and she plays hard, but she does it so gracefully, that sometimes that gets overlooked. She runs the floor hard; she takes great shots. She's just very composed and selective, which great players are. She makes everybody else around her better, too. You know, she is the best player in the country. She has been for a couple of years. You know, if you're not coaching against her, it's a real treat just to watch somebody with her ability play, and she does it with so much grace. It's just really a beautiful thing to see unless you're sitting on the other bench. Q. Carol, you know she's going to get her points, and Sylvia is very likely to get a double-double, too. When a player like Hoston heats up, do they become -- I won't say unbeatable, but do they become very difficult to beat at that point? COACH CAROL ROSS: You know, most teams have a great player, and then you have other players that play their roles and they do what they do. But for a team to really have two go-to players, the beauty of it is that they're go-to players with different abilities. It makes it very difficult to try and contain or disrupt or even diminish their abilities at all. Then if you get too much energy to that, then the rest of them know their roles very well. You know, I really thought Erica White was the one that blew the game open, because we could not contain her. She ended up making the game fast. Their transition game really, I thought, was the one factor that we had not -- I thought we could guard them and force it into a halfcourt game, then we would worry about Augustus and Fowles. I thought she made it where we had to guard everybody, we had to guard 94 feet. To me, that was the really wrecking punch out of the whole bunch, we couldn't get it into a halfcourt game to pay that much attention to the two that we were most concerned about. Q. Y'all would have wanted to go up and down, and they would have wanted it fast. COACH CAROL ROSS: We did. We didn't want them to. We wanted to play fast, from our offensive perspective. We needed easy buckets, we needed to play fast on the offensive end, but we needed it to be a grind and ugly on the defensive end. We just weren't able to make that happen. Q. She did in Baton Rouge. COACH CAROL ROSS: We did in Baton Rouge, but we could have kept that same game plan and maybe played a closer game, but I didn't think we could win that way. We just made a decision that we were going to gamble and play the way we needed to play, and if we got beat, we got beat, but it was the only chance we felt like we had to win. We came into this tournament to win, not to play close. So we wanted to get our traps and play a little bit faster than we did in Baton Rouge because, you know, I don't feel any better losing by 15 than I do by 20, both scenarios. Q. I'm sure you hope the people who vote on the alternate team remember No. 24 on Sunday. She's played pretty darn good the first two days of the tournament. COACH CAROL ROSS: I can't even imagine that anybody can't appreciate the things that a 130-pound, 5'9" player does. She plays the game with such effort and does things that people her size shouldn't be able to do just because her will to compete, her excitement to play in games like this. You know, she leaves it on the court. When the game's over, she can always feel pretty good about things because there's nothing left. I don't think there's any question that people can appreciate what she does and how she does it. THE MODERATOR: Thank you.
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