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NCAA WOMEN'S 1ST & 2ND ROUNDS REGIONALS: BATON ROUGEMarch 22, 2008Rachele FitzBrian GiorgisJulianne VianiBATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA THE MODERATOR: Coach, congratulations, and your opening statement, please. COACH GIORGIS: Just a tremendous comeback by the kids. I can't say enough about these two people here, being down 13 didn't look very good, but obviously Julianne shot us back into it, and Rachele just kept doing her thing that made her a MAC player of the year. The third component that really helped was really our bench. I think when Elisa Caron and Sarah Smrdel and Lynzee Johnson went into the game, they gave positive things, and a team that shoots the ball as well as DePaul does, to be able to hold them without a field goal for about the last nine minutes, you know, it's really a credit to the kids' defense. We had trouble in the first half rebounding, but I think we outrebounded them in the second half. We just persevered. It's hard to express two years in a row now of being able to come in and beat a BCS school, a little school like Marist. It's tremendous, and we're just looking forward to Monday. THE MODERATOR: Any questions for the student athletes? Q. Hitting all those three-pointers in a row in the second half, how were you feeling when you stepped beyond the arc? JULIANNE VIANI: I was feeling pretty confident. I missed a couple in the first half, but I had to remember that my team needs me to step up. I was getting open looks so I was just going with the flow and taking them. Q. There was one sequence in there where as Coach said, you've been outrebounded so bad in the first half, and I think the ball was tipped around three or four times and then tipped out of bounds to you and then got a three-pointer on inbounds. Did that seem to be a turning point? JULIANNE VIANI: Absolutely. At halftime, Coach really told us we needed to step up and rebound, so it was good. I think we stepped up our aggressiveness in the second half, going after balls, not worrying so much. That was a big turning point for the second half, I really believe that it helped us get going. Q. Particularly early there in the second half as they were growing their lead did you ever lose faith at all and think this isn't our night? JULIANNE VIANI: I didn't because before the game I had this supernatural faith that we were going to win. It was God. I have to credit him, but I really believed we were going to win the game. Before the game started I actually prayed to him for the victory, so I thought that was cool. Q. So God was against another Catholic school? JULIANNE VIANI: He wasn't against them (laughing). Q. Rachele, did y'all have any idea you guys outscored them 32 to 2 over the last 12 minutes? Could you talk about the frustration you could see on them? Did you have any idea what kind of a roll you were on? RACHELE FITZ: As soon as Julianne started hitting shots and we got open looks inside, we knew we were on a roll. I think they were getting really down on themselves, and we got up by 9 and then 11 and 13, just kept going. I think they were getting frustrated and they weren't focusing as much perhaps. But it's really frustrating when that happens. Q. Rachele, can you contrast the first half to the second half both the inside battle and the rebound points? RACHELE FITZ: It was a battle the whole time. They're extremely strong and aggressive post players, and we knew that coming in. But like Julianne said, and Coach commented in the locker room at halftime that we really do need to step up our game and stop worrying about fouls and just go hard to offensive and defensive boards, and I feel that we really stepped up the second half, everyone, rebounding, the guards, boxing out, post boxing out and getting more rebounds and getting the ball out, and I think that helped a lot. Then we matched their aggressive and physicalness. Q. For either of the players, just having last year's experience behind you, did that do anything to maybe calm your nerves as they increased their lead? JULIANNE VIANI: Absolutely, yeah. I think that gave us a lot of confidence that we've been there before and we can do it again, so I really do believe that did help us a lot coming into the game. I mean, we didn't have pressure, either way, but it helped. It helped boost our confidence. THE MODERATOR: We'll excuse these young ladies and thank them very much. Questions for Coach Brian Giorgis? Q. Same thing I asked Julianne. Did you ever lose faith? Did you ever think, well, maybe this isn't our night? Maybe this isn't our year? COACH GIORGIS: No, because there was enough time left. Actually the whole thing that we tried to do was to convince the kids that we don't have any 12-point plays in our play book, and don't try to get it all back at once. So basically we just -- when we got down 13, we basically just tried to break the game down in pieces and say, guys, by the next media time-out let's get it in single digits, by the next one after that let's try to get it to five or less, and it seemed to work, although Julianne got hers in bunches. We ran a couple plays for her to see if we could get her a look, and we were successful with that. So then we ran a different play for her to get a look, and that worked. She brought us back in the game, and that combined with finding Rachele inside and really putting the clamps down defensively, I think we got them to play the way that we were where they tried to rush everything back once we made the run because they seemed to come off beyond the ball screens a little bit faster, a little bit out of control or not under control in shots that we were making earlier that didn't make. The thing that we were fortunate with is we didn't give up the second and third opportunities. I think at halftime they had seven second-chance points to our zero, and it ended up 9-9. We did a much better job, again, being a little bit more aggressive in the second half. Q. You've been with Julianne a long time -- COACH GIORGIS: I've known her since about the fourth grade. Her dad is my dentist and has been for a long time, so yeah, I've known the Vianis. I've coached three of them, so you could say that. Q. Is it what you expect out of her? COACH GIORGIS: There is no greater person I know of as a person of faith than that girl there. She never loses confidence in herself, and she just believes and she believes it's going to be willed. I'm not going to argue with her. Q. How long do you want them to appreciate this and enjoy this? And then when do you start practicing -- COACH GIORGIS: No different than last year. We're going to enjoy this tonight. We're going to go to church tomorrow and celebrate Easter, and then we'll get going after either LSU or Jackson State tomorrow afternoon. I'm sure we've already done a little bit of work beforehand just in case, and again, BCS wins, they've been happening more frequent, but this is another big, huge, important moment in our school's history, and we're going to enjoy it. We've always enjoyed these things. Q. Could you just talk about the possibility of facing the No. 2 LSU on their home court tomorrow? COACH GIORGIS: Yeah, that's -- they're a tremendous team, but that's what you wanted to do. When you see the brackets come out, you knew DePaul is just a heck of a team. And to be honest with you, we didn't really think of LSU. We didn't talk about LSU because our focus was on DePaul, and tomorrow our focus will be on LSU, assuming they get there, and obviously they're one of the top -- they're one of the seven or eight teams that people talk about that can win a national championship, and they're playing on their court. What the heck, we'll go after it just like we do everything, and we'll have a lot of fun doing it. And if they beat us we'll tip our hats to them and we'll go home and say it's a tremendous season. If we're fortunate enough to play, have the type of comeback and shoot the ball like we did in the second half and pull out another miracle, it's not Palo Alto, but we're game for it. We go about things. No one expects the little 4,000 school to do much, and we'll just go after them. We've played Tennessee, Duke, Maryland, Ohio State, we've played a lot of the big schools, and yeah, we've lost to them, too, but we'll go after them the way we try to go after everybody. Our little theme in the locker room has been the midge. We've got a lot of people from Cleveland including myself, and the midge is that little bug that landed on Joba Chamberlain during the Yankees' run. That's what we want to be. We want to be midges. That doesn't mean we're going to win things, but we want to be pests. That's the way we've gone about the NCAA Tournament last year, this year. We just want to be pests. We aren't the most athletic team out there. As you could see today we aren't the most physical team, we just want to be pests. If it's good enough to win, great. If it's not, we've had a heck of a year. THE MODERATOR: Coach Giorgis, thanks very much. We'll see you at tomorrow afternoon's press conference. End of FastScripts |
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