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NCAA WOMEN'S FINAL FOUR

April 6, 2008

TAMPA, FLORIDA

THE MODERATOR: We're joined up here by Connecticut head coach Geno Auriemma, as well as student-athletes Ketia Swanier and Renee Montgomery.
Coach, when you're ready, an opening statement. We'll take questions for the student-athletes, and then back to you.
COACH AURIEMMA: At this time of the year, especially in this environment, unless you win, there's really not a lot that you can say that's going to make any of the players up here, any of the players in the locker room feel any better.
There's no words to describe what it means to put everything, your heart and soul into something and come up short.
The one thing I will say is it's unfortunate that the season comes down to one weekend and if it doesn't go your way, the other five months seem to have no meaning. And that's why this is such a difficult game to lose, or the next game if you lose that one, because all you remember now, today, at this point, is what happened in those 40 minutes. You don't remember all the things that led to getting here.
So I want them to remember the things that they did to get here and what our seniors accomplished. And life's thrown a lot of things at us this particular season. Took away two of our players. Limited one of them. And now the fairytale didn't have a happy ending. But that's life.
THE MODERATOR: Questions first for the student-athletes.

Q. Ketia, you got into foul trouble early in this one on Candice, how much do you think that played a role in not being able to come back there at the end?
KETIA SWANIER: I mean, I thought Lorin came in and did what she had to do. Stanford just executed their offense very well and we didn't hit shots. We lost to a really good team.

Q. Can you talk about, you broke with tradition this year cutting down the nets at the regional finals, getting the seniors here. Do you think you were too focused on getting to the Final Four and not winning the national championship?
RENEE MONTGOMERY: No, our ultimate goal was to win a national championship. I think the Final Four was just a hurdle that we had to overcome.

Q. How much better was Stanford this time around?
KETIA SWANIER: They were a lot better. They just didn't have a key focus on one or two players. Everybody on our team stepped up and instead of having to guard only two players, you have to guard all five players on the floor. And they executed their offense really well. They move around a lot. And that's the big difference, just everybody pretty much stepping up on their team than at the beginning of the year.

Q. Stanford was able to contain Maya it seemed like a lot in the first half but in the second half she really started going. How much confidence did you have in her and your team and thinking you were going to be able to come back when she started hitting the 3s and everything else she did in the second half?
KETIA SWANIER: I don't think our team just relies on Maya Moore. The whole time I never doubted everybody on the floor thought we were going to lose, even when Maya was missing shots. There was never a point in time we thought we were going to lose. We played hard the whole way through and you can't depend on one player hitting shots. Everybody has to do their part, especially this time of the year.

Q. Obviously the first time you played them you had Mel and Kalana and Kalana is such a great defensive player, how much did you miss them this time around?
RENEE MONTGOMERY: A lot. I think we missed them all year, but this game it really showed. We had to have shorter people guarding Candice a lot. She was able to get her shot off pretty much any time she wanted. In the beginning in the Virgin Islands when we had Kalana and Mel, it was tougher for her to get shots off. We missed them all year, but yeah, definitely it showed up tonight.

Q. Can you pinpoint just a couple of areas where you think if maybe we could have done this or done that, you might have been able win?
RENEE MONTGOMERY: If we could have executed better on offense, I think really if we could have made some more shots. We really got a lot of open looks and pretty much throughout the season we've made the majority of those shots and it's gotten us momentum, then we continue to make more shots. But I think when we were getting wide open looks and we were missing them, it was just tough because it's shots that we usually make and it's part of our offense.
THE MODERATOR: Thank you, both of you.
Questions for Coach.

Q. Do you think they beat you the way you beat a lot of teams by being really smart? You've been on the other end of that a lot.
COACH AURIEMMA: Oh, yeah. Yeah. They didn't make too many mistakes today. And I think the first ten minutes of the game kind of set the tone for the game. And one of the things that happened during that first ten minutes was, you know, the way we play that got us here and just really would kind of stun people, you know, with the runs that we would go on, bad coaching. We shouldn't have played like that today.
Now, you hate to say you want to change the way you play when you get to the Final Four, but as Renee said, this is the one team we can't match up with without the two guys that were hurt. Like any other team, you don't necessarily have to guard all five of them. And they don't guard you. So we were caught in a situation where they were able to do things to us that we couldn't do to them. And we needed them to miss some shots and they didn't, which is what they did in the Virgin Islands.
Every shot they missed in the Virgin Islands they made it today. Every one. And that first ten minutes, I'll bet you we spent nine minutes on defense that first ten minutes. They would come down, run their stuff for about 25 seconds, get the shot they wanted. We run down, make a pass, sometimes we'd stall and make two passes. Every once in a while it would be a full-blown delay and we'd get three passes and somebody would take an open shot. Now, if those go in like they did for the majority of the season, then it's a different ball game. But they didn't.
In retrospect, we didn't do enough to make them play more defense than they had to. And the thing that got us here hurt us in the end. And when we cut it to 47-46, I think it was, Wiggins made two straight 3s. Then Pedersen makes one. They didn't make those in November.
Stanford played a lot better today. They're a lot better team than they were back in November and they played the game today the way we usually play it. We got done in by our own stuff.
As Tara said, they changed some things after they played us. They added a couple of things that we did to them and they did them better than we did today.

Q. When you say bad coaching, what would you have done differently?
COACH AURIEMMA: I would have used up all five of my timeouts in the first half to slow our guys down. We couldn't slow them down. They just want to go. That's the kind of team we are. That's the kind of people we have. They just want to go.
They get an open shot, they want to take it. And you can't -- at this time of the year, you don't want to be tentative. You never want to be tentative. You never want to be second-guessing yourself, should I shoot it, should I not shoot it.
So the way we play the game, when we're open, we shoot it. Well, they weren't going in. And it was one and done and it was a constant struggle on the defensive end, because we were down, it seemed like, the majority of the game.
If we could have stayed on offense a little bit longer, we could have caught our breath a little bit. Renee's probably a little bit worn out right now since Mel got hurt. It caught up to her, the 40 minutes, 40 minutes, 40 minutes.
And we couldn't press. I had this grand strategy. At the 10-minute mark we're going to press the hell out of these guys. Well, got us to within 1, but we couldn't.
And we talked about it at halftime. The way you play Stanford you have to play them full court. You can't play them half court. It's too much of a mismatch for us.

Q. You talked about what you had built all season and to have something kind of just blow up in one game. Could you talk about the hurt of that?
COACH AURIEMMA: Yeah, I don't think there's any way that you can explain the feeling that you have when you lose this game or the national championship game for that matter.
Just sitting right here listening to the kids talk, you say to yourself: Man, when we go back, you know -- somebody asked me, what are you going to tell your players? I'm going to tell them we'll be back here next year, you can count on that. Then you sit here and it hits you that's 365 days from now. That's a lot of practices. That's a lot of drills. That's a lot of games. That's a lot of travel. That's a lot of injuries, no injuries, good luck, bad luck.
The incredible effort that it takes to get here and in a span of 40 minutes it's gone. And for a player -- I think that's a good word, you're walking along great and it just blows up and it's gone. It's gone. And it's a stunned feeling that you have to be there to experience it. You have to have been in that situation to experience it.
And all year long, you know, we were holding out hope that it wouldn't catch up to us. Don't worry about it, we can do it. I heard coaches talk about it on scouting reports. You have to get to Connecticut's guards, they don't have any depth in the guard spot, nobody's ever tried to do that to them, gotta get them, gotta get them, get them in foul trouble, wear them out.
I thought they better hurry up. We only have two games left. And they got us today.

Q. Will you watch Tuesday's game?
COACH AURIEMMA: Yeah, I have to, I'm on the WBCA's board of directors. So I was told I have to be here for that game. But I would watch it anyway. I would watch it anyway. And I'm sure my players will watch it. It's part of who you are. It's part of what you do. It's our game.

Q. The people back home might have been sitting there asking: Well, why didn't they play the pressure defense the whole game. I think I know the answer. But you gotta say it.
COACH AURIEMMA: Yeah. When the game started, the plan was that we would alternate between some pressure. And if we had some success with it, we would do more. The problem was, you don't make enough shots, so you can't get into your pressure. You don't get to the free throw line, so you can't set up your pressure. Your starting point guard goes down with two fouls. So now you're really short on bodies. And I think we would have lost worse if we would have played like that from the beginning.
But I'm sure there's a lot of coaches out there right now that watched the game, real and imaginary coaches, that have a lot of ideas that we could have done differently.

Q. Is it possible that you guys just ran into a team that's on a magical run?
COACH AURIEMMA: That's always possible. And that's always the case when a team has a really hot player. I think Candice Wiggins has been the best player in this tournament from the very first game. And I said this yesterday, or the day before, actually, when we had a press conference about the game, that when the other players are making shots like they are right now for Stanford, it gives Candice a lot more room to maneuver and a lot more room to do what she wants to do. And then she's a really tough matchup.
Those kids knocked in shots today that didn't even come close to going in in November. But now they're going in. I watched the Maryland game, and they went in in the Maryland game. And I talked to a couple friends of mine, and they said you know what the key to beating Stanford is? I said, all right, what? Well, Kayla Pedersen has to go one for something and Hones has to go one for something and the other perimeter player has to go one for something and then Wiggins and Jayne Appel can have whatever they want.
Well, that didn't happen. And that's what makes them the team that they are right now. They're a very difficult team to play right now. Very difficult.
THE MODERATOR: Thank you, Coach.

End of FastScripts

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