NCAA WOMEN'S FINAL FOUR

April 5, 2005

Kristin Haynie

Joanne P. McCallie

Kelli Roehrig

COACH JOANNE P. McCALLIE: I would like to compliment Baylor. I thought Baylor played a terrific basketball game. I really think the outside shooting of Niemann in the first half was really critical to just the overall confidence and opening up the inside and then I thought their post players just did a great job. Basically that's the story of the game. Three players for them really doing outstanding work. I think for our game it wasn't a great game for us. Obviously we didn't play well. We didn't rebound. There's a lot of things we didn't do. But I hate to sit up here as a coach and talk about what we didn't do. I think it's important in this situation to talk about that a team played great and Baylor played great. And that's just what happens. Baylor played super, we played average, and you really can't do that at this level, that's just the bottom line.

KELLI ROEHRIG: Well, they out-rebounded us 45 to 22, and that's it alone.

KELLI ROEHRIG: They're two very great post players. They did an excellent job in the paint. They -- we just didn't box out. We didn't shot contest in the paint. They played -- we gave them way too many open looks inside.

KRISTIN HAYNIE: Definitely not. We're two great athletic teams. We're very good teams and like everyone's been saying, it was a rebounding -- we weren't disciplined enough to box them out. We knew they were tall and they could jump.

KELLI ROEHRIG: I think that was a big factor. Lindsay held her own, they did unbelievable, everything they could. There was slack in the post area. We didn't really hold our own and I mean we needed to step up.

KRISTIN HAYNIE: Definitely. This loss is going to hurt, you know, but looking back at our season we did some big things. We did a lot for the program. Overall it was a great season for us.

KRISTIN HAYNIE: It was a great game. Michigan State and Baylor making it to the finals. That says a lot about women's basketball. And it's on the rise. This program is going to keep going on the rise, getting good recruits coming in and there's going to be the same old Michigan State basketball. Hard, blue collar workers.

COACH JOANNE P. McCALLIE: They are great competitors. They just attacked more, attacking the basket more. Just being very, very aggressive like they can be. The two of them have done a terrific job for us. And they have been a terrific back court all year long. 33 is a big -- a lot of wins. And a lot of that had to do with the way our back court handled things.

COACH JOANNE P. McCALLIE: If you look at the film the kid is three feet off the line. She hit great shots. You have to give her credit for that. We definitely had her scouted and ready to in face contest her, but she hit a couple of threes that were unbelievable. I still felt that we were in great shape in the second half, despite our shooting. But we just didn't pull together the energy that we had shown against, for example, like Tennessee. We just didn't pull together the energy necessary to come down. We were down nine at one point. And we were ready to go and just a few bad decisions here or there kind of helped them notch it back up again.

COACH JOANNE P. McCALLIE: They were just great together. They're two terrific post players. I think the interesting thing about them is they don't really have to use the low block at all. They can, what I call free flow. They can go anywhere. So they will hit shots from the high post, the mid post, they will step out and make it much more harder to double, much harder to dig at them because they're constantly moving. I just thought they were beautiful. I caught myself watching them on occasion and said I better stop that and get back to coaching the game. They just really made some great shots and I really want to get back to Niemann, I think she was the whole key to this game. I think if you take number 51 off the floor, it's a whole different game. She was definitely the X factor.

COACH JOANNE P. McCALLIE: They had -- well, I think that we were a step slow. You have to remember, we played Tennessee, the most physical team around. And came back from 16 points down. We just -- nobody was moving like they could move. And that was a big problem against a nice athletic team like Baylor. I just think they played very, very well. They played great and we did not match that and I'm sorry, it's too bad it wasn't a more exciting game. It really was disingenuous to the Final Four in terms of those semi final games.

COACH JOANNE P. McCALLIE: She's just so graceful. She's a beautiful, just beautiful student-athlete, the way she moves and that. She's a great player. I think the best four player or if you want to call her a four player, that we have seen all year. That kid's an All-American.

COACH JOANNE P. McCALLIE: Yeah, and they didn't really go off. If Lindsay Bowen goes off it's 33 points like she did against TCU or Notre Dame. We didn't have anybody go off and I don't think we should pretend that we did; we didn't. And yes, they had, when I say "go off," yeah, I mean they had three players that really were very, very impressive. Their shooting percentages speak for themselves. So our defense did not do enough to take them out of their tempo and obviously that's very disappointing.

COACH JOANNE P. McCALLIE: Yes, we understand the value of rebounding. We were upset about the Big-10 tournament, because we won without rebounding. And that's never a good thing in preparation for the NCAA tournament. And I thought that that hurt us early in the NCAA tournament when we didn't play that great. I thought it hurt us, because our kids found a way to win without rebounding. And that hurt us against USC, that hurt us bad. But then we were able to get out of that and for the rest of the ride really get after the rebounds, and you saw Tennessee, we didn't do a great job and here we didn't. It's obviously been something that's been troublesome and something we need to work on.

COACH JOANNE P. McCALLIE: Well, again it goes back to their post play. Nobody in the country had two posts like them, pure and simple.

COACH JOANNE P. McCALLIE: Just wanted to shake their hands. Obviously just very impressed with what they did tonight and, yeah, we were just trying to shake hands and allow them to have the floor for their celebration. In terms of our program, it's hard to judge right now. None of us have read a paper or answered our cell phones in three weeks. We have lived in a bubble world and I guess it's back to the dog, it's back to normal life, which is probably a very, very good thing. And in terms of the program for Michigan State, we're very proud to represent Michigan State. We're very proud to have women's basketball be something special. These women have collected a lot of hardware this season and they are champions and they have been champions all season long. And I just have the utmost respect for them and it goes down as the greatest season ever for Michigan State women's basketball. And that's something we're going to be very proud about.