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MOUNTAIN WEST CONFERENCE WOMEN'S TOURNAMENT

March 10, 2007

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

THE MODERATOR: We're now joined by Mountain West Conference champion University of New Mexico, head coach Don Flanagan, student-athletes Dionne Marsh, Katie Montgomery and Julie Briody.
Coach, if you want to start with some opening remarks on the game.
COACH FLANAGAN: First of all, congratulations to BYU. Terrific team. Played an outstanding game. They have an excellent coaching staff and an excellent group of young athletes, so congratulations to them.
It was such an evenly-matched game that I wasn't sure who was going to win about four minutes left to go, and then all of a sudden we separated in a hurry. But I thought it was a great game to watch. I'm sure our athletes will tell you it was a great game to be involved in.
I don't know what determined the outcome. I think it was maybe both teams were tired. It's a tough grind to play three games in four days. Every team that we played was a physical team. We got pressed in the first game. We ran over at least 500 screens against Wyoming, then play a team like BYU that's another screening team, it's very, very difficult, these players.
Somehow about four minutes left to go they found a way to win this game. So I'm very proud of their effort. I'm very proud of the game that they played today.
THE MODERATOR: Questions now directed to the student-athletes.

Q. Dionne, can you talk about how important it was when Kubik fouled out there with five minutes to go? Did you expect the tide to turn that much as it did in the final five minutes?
DIONNE MARSH: Not necessarily. I mean, they have good post players. They're very strong. They kind of outsize us. That was one of the difficult things.
Coach had been saying the whole game, Drive to the basket, get them to foul you. I just tried to do that a little bit more, be more conscious of it in the last few minutes.

Q. Dionne, can you say what came out of you when you drew your fourth foul? You looked frustrated. After that you scored 13 of or 20 points.
DIONNE MARSH: Yeah, I guess I was just a little frustrated. I'm undersized. I just thought I was just trying to work hard basically on defense. I mean, just working hard. The refs just called it the way they did. You just have to play the game how they're calling it.

Q. You came out kind of slow, not really into the flow early. Was that just the result of having played three games in four days, fatigue setting in?
KATIE MONTGOMERY: I think so. I mean, like coach said, it's kind of tough, difficult to play three games in four days just physically, especially against the teams we played against. They're real physical teams. A lot of our girls are playing major minutes.
But, I mean, you have so much adrenaline going on out there and stuff that you just kind of got to fight through it. I thought we did a particularly good job the last five minutes of coming together and playing hard. They were tired, too. We just took it at 'em.

Q. The first half you struggled from the outside but kept on shooting. Do you feel like if you keep on shooting you'll work through the slumps, shots will fall?
KATIE MONTGOMERY: Oh, yeah. I mean, I just got to keep shooting. That's what everybody was telling me. My teammates were hitting shots. I didn't particularly need to hit those shots. Julie, Brandi, Dionne, people were hitting shots in the first half. That's when you got to try to get them the ball.
I mean, I just thought we had a great team effort the whole game. I took the shots when I was open. Luckily some of them fell in the second half.

Q. You've been saying for a while now that you didn't want to be the senior class that didn't get to the NCAA tournament. Now that you've gotten there, how does it feel?
JULIE BRIODY: I mean, that was our whole goal coming into the tournament, was that, you know, we weren't just happy to be here, we wanted to make sure we won the tournament. So there was no doubt whether we were going to be in the NCAA tournament.
I think just by the way that we played in the first two games, people saw that we were for real, we were determined, we wanted to win this game. Like they were saying, everybody was tired during this game, but we gave it all we had because we knew that if we won, we were going to get an automatic bid to the tournament.
KATIE MONTGOMERY: Just kind of what Julie said. I think we came down here on our first game Wednesday and I think we kind of wanted to prove something. We got out the first round last year. That kind of left a bad taste in our mouth.
We wanted to come out, we were real motivated, real determined. We knew if we played hard, we played together, we'd be able to win this tournament. That's what we did.
I mean, obviously we want to go to the NCAA tournament. That's our goal. But I think winning the conference championship, you know, is just as big a goal. You know, that's what you want to do from the very beginning of the season.
We've been able to do that the three out of the four years we've been here. It's a good feeling. It's good that the younger kids got to experience that young so hopefully they'll keep that tradition going.

Q. After BYU went on that run and took the lead in the second half, how much of the fact that that happened to you in the Wyoming game, do you think that helped?
JULIE BRIODY: I mean, we just knew we just needed to calm down, bring back our focus that we had before. I thought that's what we did. During the timeouts we were just talking about making sure we stayed together. BYU's a great team. We knew they were going to go on their runs.
I thought we did a great job of withstanding those runs and was able to pull out in the end.

Q. Having won so many games now, 12 of 13, how much confidence does that give you going into the NCAA tournament?
KATIE MONTGOMERY: I think that gives us a lot of confidence. I think we're playing real well right now. We're playing the best we have all season. I think just the last three games -- obviously the last 13, however many games we've won in a row, we turned it around.
We didn't start the conference season off the way we wanted to. I think we've been determined since that point. I think it just gives us a lot of confidence. People have been playing well. Brandi had a great tournament. Timi has been playing great defense. We got some younger kids in there in the first few games. I think everybody's, you know, real determined and we're playing well together and real excited.
THE MODERATOR: Thanks, ladies. You three can go. Congratulations.
Questions now for Coach Flanagan.

Q. After the Wyoming game you talked about how maybe this wasn't your most gifted physical team, but you said the effort was there. Does that make this conference tournament championship more special maybe?
COACH FLANAGAN: Well, they're all pretty special, to tell you the truth. No, not really. What I really admired about this group of players was even when we had -- early on in the conference we had some problems, and we overcame those. They always worked hard.
I mean, we had games where it was very disappointing. We lost a one-point game to Utah at home. It was a very disappointing game. The next day our players came to practice, worked hard.
They remind me of just a blue-collar team. It didn't matter what had happened the day prior, they were going to come to work, work hard, try to improve, and it paid off. It paid off at the end of the year right now in the conference championship.
I'm really proud of what they did and how they approached improving.

Q. You held Dani Wright to five points, six boards. Was that in your game plan originally? In your view, what did you do to limit her?
COACH FLANAGAN: She missed a few easy shots, which is unlike her. She normally hits those shots. They're very focused on getting the ball inside. I used several different players, but I never thought anybody was really stopping her because she got a lot of offensive rebounds. I'm not sure, some them might have been missed shots of her own.
I don't know how. I mean, it was just a team effort. We rotated people on her. Tried not to give her a deep hand. By "deep hand" I mean catch the ball over her shoulder, catch it towards the basket. She's very good at that. If you let her catch it in front of you, she's not quite as good.
If you can move her off the block just a little bit she's not quite as effective, but she's very difficult to move off the block.
We just used a lot of players and tried our hardest to stop the pass from getting inside. You saw late in the game Dionne did a great job with Riley, because Riley also is another player that's big like that and can get the ball inside and be effective. Dionne was denying that pass inside pretty effectively.

Q. Did you think Dionne became more aggressive after her fourth foul?
COACH FLANAGAN: Yeah. You know, I hate to do this, but Dionne plays better when she's mad. She got mad at her fourth foul. I don't think she thought that she got fouled. As soon as she got mad, she got motivated.
When they made their run, we talked that we weren't being aggressive enough offensively. A lot of times what you can do is one team gets the momentum and they get very, very aggressive, and they keep -- with their confidence, they're attacking you, and pretty soon you're not attacking anybody. So we turned that around with some talk about attacking back at them.
When Dionne started to do that, she got people in foul trouble. Then she hit her free-throws, which sometimes she doesn't do, but she did it this time.

Q. Coach --
COACH FLANAGAN: Yes, we are going to the NCAA tournament (smiling).

Q. At what point in the season did you feel the team had this kind of toughness and ability to turn things around?
COACH FLANAGAN: Yesterday. Honestly, you know, I mean, there was a period of time when I wasn't really sure. I wasn't sure we were going to the NIT, never mind the NCAA tournament. We struggled a little bit with this team.
As I said before, we have a different kind of personnel. We don't have the normal personnel that I've had in the past. So we had some uniqueness about this team. That uniqueness learned to play well together. I think that's what created the team that you saw today.

Q. I voted for Brandi for MVP. She didn't even make the all-tournament team. Katie, too. Is that kind of the definition of this team, the way they pulled together?
COACH FLANAGAN: I said to Brandi afterwards, we talked in the locker room, I said, If there was a defensive MVP, you were it. She did a terrific job. She defended the toughest player on every team. She did a great job. None of those kids she guarded were easy guards. She did a great job. She got beat up a little bit and bounced right back and came back in and played good defense again.
I thought Katie's play and poise right down the stretch late, we tried to get a little ball screen with Dionne and Katie because I felt those two were the keys for us to score, clear the other side, then Katie drove a couple times, got layups, then Dionne got the ball inside on a roll a couple times and scored or got fouled. Those two players played particularly well.
I thought Julie Briody played well. But, you're right, we kind of shared the limelight.
THE MODERATOR: Thanks, coach. Congratulations.
COACH FLANAGAN: Thank you.

End of FastScripts

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