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MOUNTAIN WEST CONFERENCE WOMEN'S TOURNAMENTMarch 14, 2008Beth BurnsQuenese DavisJene MorrisLAS VEGAS, NEVADA THE MODERATOR: Coach, if you want to take a minute or two and reflect on your thoughts on the game. COACH BURNS: That might take me more than a minute or two (laughter). I just think it was as fantastic an effort. It was almost for us a turning point right in front of our eyes because you got to believe, and we've never beaten TCU, ever, ever, ever. Going into this season, I remember thinking, It will be nice to coach against TCU because we've never been able to be at a competitive level. And I thought that showed a little bit early in the game. We weren't sure, Can we do what we can do against TCU? And I kept just reinforcing, You've got to believe that you can win, and then you will, because you're good enough to do that. I think we wavered a little bit in the first half. I thought Jene made huge shots to keep us in it. And then we believed. And I'll tell you this, I think TCU is a great team. I vote for the top 25 in our league, and I've been voting for them for about three, four weeks now. They are a load to handle. And I think they earned everything that they got. You know, we were guarding bigs with littles. But when it came down to it, you have to make a play. I'll defer to my left for you to ask about "the play" that you might want to know about. But it was just a great effort. I couldn't be prouder. I'm excited for about 10:00 tonight when there's going to be two Aztec teams in the championship game tomorrow. THE MODERATOR: We'll direct questions to the student-athletes for the next few minutes. Q. Quenese, do you want to talk about "the play"? QUENESE DAVIS: Well, the play was drawn up for Jene. We were supposed to run one of our sets, one of our out-of-bounds plays. I just saw everyone attracting their attention to Jene, especially Adrianne Ross. I just do what I always do when I see that, I threw the ball off her butt and finished the play. COACH BURNS: Just so you know, this is the fourth time she's done this. She's four for four. Our team expects it. People expect it. It's interesting. She's done it three other time, always in the body of the game. I've always had a reporter that says, Does it bother you she's done that? I'll say, She's three for three. Nothing bothers me when it works. That's from playing ball since you were a little kid. In March players make plays, and Q couldn't have made a bigger one. Q. Jene, speaking of that play, could you talk about maybe how impressed you are with what kind of wherewithal it takes to do something like that. JENE MORRIS: Like coach said, she's now four for four. I watched her do it all last year when I was redshirting. So it didn't surprise me at all when she pulled it off in this game today. Actually, I'm so happy she did it. Everyone was attracting their attention towards me. Q makes big plays. She's a point guard. Q. You had to come in pretty confident to pull off a couple wins like you have here. Even so, are you surprised at all to find yourselves where you are at this juncture? JENE MORRIS: No, I'm not surprised. You know, I think we had high expectations during the season and we didn't really quite meet those expectations. And every time we played these teams, we've come close, but we never quite got over that hump. We were never blown out by these teams and I think we hung with these teams. Going into this tournament, you know, it was time to prove what we could do. There were a lot of doubts against us. We knew all along what we could do, what we were capable of. Q. Jene, as far as that steal at the end of the game, when they had the inbound pass, was that something you had seen the whole game, you were waiting for the right time? JENE MORRIS: It was more instincts. Coach always says, Never throw a pork shop by a wolf. She's a great player. COACH BURNS: She's the wolf, not the pork chop. JENE MORRIS: They're going to give it to her at the end of the game. I was in the lane, dove for it, happened to get it. Q. What did you feel was the turning point in the game? When did you feel like you started to take control? QUENESE DAVIS: When Coco hit the big three. That gave us a lot of momentum right there. If they would have took that away with the foul, then I think we would have had to work a little bit more harder than we did. Q. Paris, from one Caver to another, what is it like playing against a team so big and physical, not just tall? PARIS JOHNSON: In high school, it always went to the top camps around the country, and I was face to face with huge girls, big bodies. But those big bodies are not like mine. They weren't very versatile. They were just in the post mostly. We had to go head-to-head, toe-to-toe, get through it. It just makes me stronger. You know, I go up with them all the time. I just have to dig deep, keep them off the glass, do everything I could do to stop them. It was pretty tough, but I had it in me. THE MODERATOR: Guys, you can go. Good job. Congratulations. Q. How do you recruit to Iceland? COACH BURNS: There's players all over the world. I said this two days ago against Wyoming. I'd echo the same thing today. I can't have more respect for Jeff Mittie and TCU basketball. They are the standard bearers. If we wanted to be good, we have to be able to compete with these people. He is a fantastic recruiter. His net is a little bit wider than mine, I guess. Interestingly, we'll tell this publicly. We call No. 4 Ice because she's from Iceland. We didn't want to mispronounce her last name. It's hard to say, You have and then all those syllables, so we call her Ice. I'd love to get some ice because I think both No. 4 and No. 42, Paris Johnson, Allison Duffy, are going to be beating on each other for the next three years in the conference. Those are four really good young players in our league. Q. What do you think is going on with this program right now, this team in particular? I know Jene talked a little bit about how you hung with some teams during the course of the season. This is a team that beat you by an average margin of 22. What do you think is happening right now? COACH BURNS: I think that, you know, when -- I don't mean to keep saying the same thing. But as a unit, a team has got to believe they can be successful. And I've never felt -- we never felt that we didn't have -- we have talented people on our team, you know. We have talented people. They don't have experience. And we don't have a lot of them. So as we experienced an injury spread out, and maybe that was due to our immaturity, I say that more because of our youth, we lose Shanna Demus, we go into the tank a little bit. Can we do this? It's really hard to play a full-court pressure style. Then it got to the latter part of the season, and I can't certainly change what we've been doing. What's happening? People are believing. It's hard to change a culture. It's a lot easier to change physicality than it is between the ears. That's what I meant. It started on Wednesday, but the switch got flipped tonight because everybody, you saw everybody on our team fighting, scrapping and forcing turnovers. I think we were intimidated by their speed early. I told them, Don't play against the ghosts of TCU past. This is right now. Use what you got, do what you do. I think Jene making that steal kind of shows you, you can't be tentative, you got to play. Q. Right before Quenese made that play, Jene drove baseline. Was that what you had planned there? COACH BURNS: It's just a read. I mean, we were in our continuity set. We ran a two game with Jene and Paris. We just wanted to get an isolation with Jene and Paris, with Q as a kick-out. We were rotating Sandy back in anticipation we might not get something. I hope I'm smart enough to put the ball in the hands of people who can create. The less predictable the better. The ball was going to be in Jene's hands, Paris was going to give her a rub, we were going to play. Q. The two seconds on the shot clock, ball out of bounds, are you thinking, We made it so far? COACH BURNS: Goodness, no. You're giving me way more credit than that. It happens fast. This was our challenge. They were so difficult to defend that we went with a little lineup because we had to use quickness. We don't do that in the majority of our games. So for all our sets, LaSandra Dixon was playing a position she never really played, let alone in a situation like that. So we were just trying to get in a set where we have an isolation play for Jene or a lob play to Paris. Again, Q made the play. March is about players. Q. The matchup with New Mexico tomorrow, what you think you need to do to continue this run? COACH BURNS: We're having a really good time up here, and then you've decided to... (laughter). No, I mean, I would say it's kind of the same thing again. We've had two really tough, physical games with New Mexico. I can say easily on record, they were kind of my dark horse going in. Now I hope I'm wrong. Because I think they have two things: they have two great seniors and they have championship experience. Those were the things that, you know, coming into the tournament I felt I would not have been surprised -- I'm not surprised at the road they've taken. It's going to be a great matchup. I think we've played them well both times. I think we'll go into it confident. There's 40 minutes that separate two teams that know the only way they get to the NCAA tournament is by playing that game. I think it's gonna be a fantastic game. Q. This conference, the NCAA tournament, what do you think about TCU and their resumé? COACH BURNS: You know, I'm not an authority on this stuff. I prognosticate just like everybody else. I think they're a great team. I think what they've done -- if they truly look at your body of work and your momentum towards the latter part of the year, I think that bodes well. Obviously they came into conference with some losses, and they have a win over a top 10 team in Oklahoma State. I think it will depend on what happens throughout the weekend. I'd like to think that those three teams - speaking of Wyoming and Utah and TCU - were the three teams that would get bids, and then whoever won our tournament, if it was somebody different. We have eight bids over the last two years. We have nothing to back down for in this league with the RPI and how good our teams are. So hopefully what we've done in the past will help us there, too. THE MODERATOR: Thanks, coach. Good luck. COACH BURNS: Thank you all very much. End of FastScripts |
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