WNBA FINALS: MONARCHS v SUN

September 20, 2005

John Whisenant

THE MODERATOR: Next up we'll have Sacramento coach John Whisenant and he'll do an opening statement and then go into the questions.

COACH JOHN WHISENANT: I couldn't get away from the ladies in the locker room. They got me before I got out with the champagne. Obviously we're thrilled. This has been a long journey since I came here and got involved with women's professional basketball. And it's just been a wonderful experience and a steady climb to get to the top. There's so many people that are involved in it: Great, great owners in the Maloof family. They're just, they have just handed me their franchise and said, "Go get it. Get us a championship." And having Yolanda and Ticha to lead a group of new, young players has just been -- I mean, I had a good feeling about their skills fitting in with our system, but you never know whether all those pieces will be cohesive or not. These fans have just jumped on, I think it's great for women's basketball and this city. We have got great pro sports fans here, as all of you know, and it's shown tonight. I think this is a great step for the future of WNBA in Sacramento. We have got a good building block for our future. Yolanda's deservingly received the MVP. There are a lot of players that played selflessly throughout the season. You can just name them all. So my coaching staff did a wonderful job. They even bought into our defensive system and believed in it. Getting people to believe is the first step in any, no matter whether you play a zone or a man-to-man like we do or some other type of defense or offense, you have to make people believe. And so it's very satisfying for me to come back. We struggled in the first half. We were -- we lost our focus with the pressure, the intensity of this game. We had people that had never been here before and wanted it so badly that it was just, I was afraid, I knew the basket would shrink up. It looked like it was about the size of a thimble. But we lost our focus in how we did things. And we were just discombobulated, if that's a word. But, anyway, we got it straightened out, we talked about it at halftime. They, as usual, listened. They listened when you explain things to them and I thought came out in the second half and just were determined to get this win.

COACH JOHN WHISENANT: No, we just wanted to make sure we didn't do what we had done in the second game. We made sure DeMya knew she was playing. She was guarding her man all the way out, face- guarding we call it. We normally we don't guard that way. We only, we're all -- only person on the ball's on the man, everybody else is toward the ball. And so on, so forth. DeMya understood and we just face-guarded and wanted them to take a tough shot. It they drove it inside the three-point line we were going to give them a shot or foul them quickly and put them on the line. But they were going to do that, because they wanted the three. They had to have a three, so they weren't going to do it. So we wanted to make sure we did not foul them and make it a four-point play. So we discussed it, we had plenty of time to talk about woulda, coulda, shoulda because of the second game up in Connecticut that we should have won, we felt.

COACH JOHN WHISENANT: Just what I just said to you. We have lost our focus, they outrebounded us. The areas we're supposed to win, they have beaten us. We turned it over nine times when we haven't turned it over nine times in a whole game in two of the other series. We were outrebounded in an area that we should dominate them. We didn't get any steals. I explained to them why, terms that most don't understand about our defense, step help, white line, things that we -- rules that we have and what we do on the defense that we abandoned in the first half. And they were all nodding, they were in agreement. I said, it's the pressure. That's not uncommon. It's the first time to be here. You got 17 or 16,000 fans out there screaming and yelling, and you want this badly and it's not uncommon for this to happen.