NCAA WOMEN'S FINAL FOUR

March 26, 1999

Andy Landers

Tawana McDonald

Coco Miller

COACH ANDY LANDERS: I think that Duke probably played the way that they would like to have played. And they are very good at that game. They executed stuff very well. They spread you offensively, because they can. And they can because they can shoot the 3s. They hit those 3s; so you have to go out. And when you go out, you leave yourself vulnerable inside, and you find yourself yo-yoing from a very talented perimeter player -- I mean, post player, to three very talented shooters. It's almost as if you choose your poison. You know, I was pleased with our team's performance. I thought in the first half, you know, we got behind early. But that was my fault, because we pressed and dropped into the zone. And the zone had no effect. And they got ahead of us there by shooting the 3. But we fell back and took a lead and looked like we were in pretty good shape until right before halftime when we had what I would call our first lapse there. We went down by 6. Came out in the second half. Again, they started to hit the 3 and we weren't scoring. Then we make a couple of turnovers, and then they blowout with a lead. But we didn't fold. We made a couple of runs there. And we couldn't get back into it. And some of that might be to our discredit, but some of it -- a lot of it, certainly, is to Duke's credit, as they kept their poise and continued to do the things that Duke likes to do.

COACH ANDY LANDERS: I thought about that briefly on the plane on the way out here. Last year was the most difficult year, really, of my life. Not just with coaching, but it was very difficult for me. A lot of injuries and circumstances that we had no control over. Yes, this year has been very satisfying, rewarding -- or pleasing, I should say, not satisfying. But very pleasing and rewarding; and particularly coming down the stretch. To see us coming out of a two-week long funk where we lost some games and rebuild ourselves and restore our own integrity, play into the position that we are in today is just sort of very pleasing.

COACH ANDY LANDERS: Well, you obviously aren't as good a judge of talent as some other people, because most of those players are pretty damned good players. And I would disagree with you, they could probably start a lot of players, not just Duke. How did they beat us? They beat us, as I said a moment ago, doing the things that Duke likes to do: Spread you, shoot the 3s and throw it inside.

COCO MILLER: Defensively, I thought they played very well. They did a good job of giving me the basket. And they also did a good job of recovering on the kickouts.

TAWANA McDONALD: What did I learn?

TAWANA McDONALD: I think we fought each other through the whole game and I never gave up and she never gave up.

COACH ANDY LANDERS: Well, they in many ways have been the engine that has driven us. You know, the greatest compliment I think that you can pay any basketball player or athlete, for that mat certify that every day, day in day out, they come to play. You know, you never have to encourage them to do more. That's a day-to-day process. Every day they are like that. And you know, when you have people like that on your basketball team, the par is set and the pace is set for your squad. So in that sense, I think that they drive us on a day-to-day basis and game in and game out.

COACH ANDY LANDERS: We didn't have a very good effect defensively. Again, and I hate to sound redundant, but I'm convinced that the problem is what the problem is. They shoot the ball terrifically from the 3 point line. And as we spread ourselves all around the perimeter, we leave ourselves vulnerable inside. And I just thought that they did a great job of penetrating and kicking back out to the open three. Sometimes they shot it sometimes for whatever reason they didn't shoot it, they would go on with the drive and pitch a couple more times and comeback to it. And if you got out there on them, you left yourself vulnerable inside and they kick it back in. That was for 40 minutes. That is what they ran for 40 minutes. They may have started off something a little bit differently but basically it was that way for 40. We didn't -- the reason we couldn't change the momentum of the game was because we couldn't get to, in my opinion, the ball defensively to deflect and run to get ourselves excited offensively. You know, when you have a team that can shoot the ball as well as they do, they have three perimeter players all of them average -- half of their shots of 3s and they shoot a very, very good percentage; so they have got the ability we could not knock any balls down and get them out and run. They didn't miss a lot of shots. They shot over 50 percent from the floor because they are not missing a lot of shots. Your opportunity to run off the glass has gone down; so, the potential to spark ourselves was really small in there because of our inability to deflect balls.

COCO MILLER: Yeah, we were a young team. We've got some great players returning some great players coming in and I'm just looking forward to getting back here again.

COACH ANDY LANDERS: I agree with Coco. You know, for those that haven't seen us play or seen us play very much, this is true. I mean, we improved a little bit tonight. I mean, we lost a basketball game, you know, some of the things that we did and the way that we did them particularly on the offensive end, we had not done before, so we continue to improve. And in the next year we're going to get better. We're very young and hopefully this will be the kind of thing that motivates us, as Coco said, to get back.

COCO MILLER: I guess its kind of bittersweet. In some ways I hate losing and it's very painful but then again I'm very proud of this basketball team and how much we have accomplished this season.

DEBBIE BYRNE: Thank you very much.