BIG 12 CONFERENCE WOMEN'S TOURNAMENT

March 10, 2005

Jamie Carey

Jody Conradt

Tiffany Jackson

COACH CONRADT: It was. Disappointing. We came out so good early. Everything was clicking. We hit everything we put up. I thought our flow was great. I loved the tempo. Then it was almost like it was too easy for us and we started to self-destruct. It's hard to put your finger on what happens when you lose your momentum like that, but obviously I wish I could have done some things differently at this point. But I kept thinking we would right ourselves. Then we did for a short time, get back to a 10-point lead, then we have two defensive breakdowns in succession. By then they had momentum and a will to get back in the game. Last part of the game I thought we executed, had some really good looks, and some days it just won't go down for you. So disappointing. K State is really good. I would not have predicted that the stat sheet would look the way it looks. I thought we did a really good job on Wecker. If you told me that we would hold her under 20, I would think we had a really good chance to win. But we let other players step up and probably have career games. Ironically, that's one of the things we talked about not letting happen when we went into this game. Wecker's hard to guard. Koehn is hard to guard. They're going to get their points. Let's try to make everybody else on the team really have to struggle to get points. It just didn't work out that way. So credit to their whole team because they stepped up, and I'm sure Deb was pleased with the play of people who aren't dependent on to score and had really good nights and we couldn't seem to have an answer for that.

TIFFANY JACKSON: No. I've seen Brie play a lot in high school. I know she's very aggressive. I wasn't surprised at all.

JAMIE CAREY: Uhm, well, we were down by three and there was like three seconds on the clock. Daria took a shot from the corner I think about eight seconds on the clock. I think it was Tiffany that got the rebound and kicked it out. I was just trying to put up a shot. Didn't fall.

JAMIE CAREY: It felt off.

TIFFANY JACKSON: I think a loss in this manner will just give us more motivation. We went through this a lot at the beginning of the season, and it was really hard. Going through it again, I think it will give us a lot of motivation.

JAMIE CAREY: I want to echo that. I don't think anyone in the locker room was pleased with what happened. When you have a situation like that, you know, I think the only thing you can do is get back in the gym and work hard, you know, get back to ourselves and go from there.

COACH CONRADT: Not at all. Not at all. I think this team has matured and grown up a lot. I think there were different circumstances tonight. I wish I could have managed it better. The rotation never felt comfortable to me. We just probably got too lackadaisical when we were so good early. I felt like we took too hard of shots. We didn't show a lot of patience. One of the hard things is tempo is really upbeat, we wanted to push, but then we needed to gear it down when we got in the halfcourt set, and we didn't do that. We haven't had an opportunity to push the ball like that in a long time, so I think we got really excited about it and started really running, then didn't change gears. In the meantime, some of their players started to hit shots that I have to tell you that I'd give them those shots going into this game, but they made them. Would I think we would have layups rim out late like we did? No. Those aren't the kind of things that you usually expect to happen. Kala had a couple, Jamie had one. That just doesn't happen very often. There were a lot of circumstances. I never lost confidence that we were going to pull the game out. But when we missed the layup to tie it up, I thought, you know, this may not be meant to be. At this point in the season, we're just going to go home and be thankful for an extra day's rest and get ready. I mean, I don't know how much it took out of us last night to play the kind of game we played. Had we won this, I would have been a lot more concerned about how we were going to play a third game against a really good team on Saturday than I am worried about having lost this game.

COACH CONRADT: I stopped caring about the seeding a long time ago because it's not something you can control. I don't have a clue how that's all going to play out. I think the committee's going to have the hardest job they've had in a really long time, maybe ever, in terms of sorting out who deserves what. I can't see an easy route for anyone because there's so many good teams out there. Not going to worry about it. Again, I came in here thinking I don't want to go home with tired legs and being worried about how they're going to recover to get ready to play their best basketball. So now we don't have that concern. We'll take a couple of days off. We'll see what happens on Sunday. Then we'll start to get ready for whoever is wherever.

COACH CONRADT: Absolutely. Lack of communication and just defensive breakdowns. We were trying to change some things. We were switching some things. We were hedging some things. We were trying to make them have different looks about what we were doing defensively. Our communication wasn't as good as it needed to be in some of those situations. Defense is a five-person thing. The team talked a little about being concerned with their person scoring and not getting in help side and not switching and not doing some things. Nothing there, except when you play man-to-man defense, you all have to be on the same page, and at times we weren't. And, again, a little bit surprised that some of the players made some of the shots that they made. What we should have done is recognize that they were having career nights and make an adjustment. But I'll take responsibility for that. I couldn't seem to get that across.

COACH CONRADT: I think we went in expecting that. You never want to play Kansas State or Iowa State in Kansas City because they bring their home crowd, and it does feel like an opponent's floor. But that's not something I think that is surprising or not something that you shouldn't be able to deal with.

COACH CONRADT: I think somebody hit on that early. Brie was aggressive. I think you always have to think about the psyche of the players that you're playing against. Brie's from Texas. She's heard a lot about the players that were wearing our jerseys. We didn't recruit Brie, which might have been a mistake. No, I could factor all that in there. She played well against us when we played them in - where were we - Manhattan, and had some chances to help them win there, and maybe didn't make plays. You look at her motivation. I think she played really, really well. Probably was the difference in the game. But I don't know how many shots Twiggy McIntyre takes a game. Does anybody know that? How many three's does she shoot? Sometimes the stars just align in a different way. And basketball is a game of percentages. I've always believed that. It's percentages on the defensive end. You try to force people into low-percentage shots or people who don't have ability to make certain shots, you give up some things. You can't guard everything and everybody. On the offensive end, you take the high-percentage shots. And we had some breakdowns on both ends. I thought we took too hard of shots through a stretch there in the first half when our lead started to dwindle. But credit to Kansas State, they're a good team, and Wecker's really good. And Koehn, you know, we did a really good job on her, I think. She got one layup on Jamie, but let's think about what Jamie's done for two nights in a row. She's played 40 minutes, face-guarded the three point shooter that runs all over the place on both teams, and then we wonder why she doesn't have legs to make a layup. That kind of thing I think factors into it. Hopefully we won't play back-to-back in the NCAAs. Hopefully Nina will get back in the rotation and we'll have a little more experience and depth.