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BIG 12 CONFERENCE WOMEN'S TOURNAMENTMarch 12, 2009Cory MontgomeryYvonne TurnerConnie YoriOKLAHOMA CITY, OKLAHOMA Kansas – 61 THE MODERATOR: Coach Yori, your comments about the game? COACH YORI: I thought Kansas played really well offensively. I'm not sure what more we could do on our defensive end. But I just thought they took and made a lot of tough shots. I thought our players played really hard. I thought we tried to take 'em out of what they wanted to do. I thought we tried to dictate and yet they still made a lot of plays. They've got two big guards in McCray and Morris, who create lots of match-up problems for us. We're small at the guard and they have bigger guards than we do and they made -- you know, we knew in playing Kansas that they create a lot of match-up problems for us, and they took advantage of those match-ups, and they shot over us a lot and made shots. Credit to them for making those plays. I don't know what else we can do defensively in terms of guarding them. But on the other hand, we had our opportunities, too, and we started out, I think we missed our first seven 3's, something like that. And late in the game we had drives to the basket and missed a few, and missed some free-throws. So we had our opportunities and they made more plays than we did, and that's a credit to them. Q. Cory, it seemed like it was more difficult to get you the ball later in the game. Was that true? CORY MONTGOMERY: It's hard to switch it up and dig out some of the players who aren't outside shooters. And like Coach said, we had open shots and we just didn't knock 'em down in the second half. Q. Can you follow up, Voni, on what Connie said about their guards and the match-up problems and how big they are? How difficult of a task is that for you guys? YVONNE TURNER: It's hard for us. We've been experiencing a size advantage this year. And when you play against bigger guards that's bigger than us, then it's tougher for our little guards, including myself, to help off their guards. Q. What have you learned throughout this year? Your team has battled a lot of adversity with the injuries starting the beginning of the season with Kelsey, what have you learned? I know you have the WNIT to play for, but what have you learned about this season? YVONNE TURNER: I think the big thing we learned is playing during adversity, we had a lot of things this season to try and bring us down and we fought through it and ended up finishing our season strong, and it's helped our team come closer together. CORY MONTGOMERY: I think the more team chemistry we have, the better we play. When we play as a team, we're a pretty good team and hard to stop. I think that's one of the main things that we learned this year is sticking together as a team, whether through illness and sickness, and things like that. Q. How do you feel about playing in the WNIT, which is what it looks like will be the case. CORY MONTGOMERY: I'm very excited, our team is excited, our coaches are excited. We're glad we have the opportunity to further our season. That just let's us know how great our team is and that we're not going down without fightin' hard. YVONNE TURNER: The way that we look at it is like our season isn't over yet, and we can go into the WNIT and come out and be successful and win a few games and try and win the whole entire thing. COACH YORI: Might want to get a bid, first. Q. Could you talk about that? Do you think your team has earned a bid? COACH YORI: We're in the 50s in the RPI. We're going into this game, I believe we were 56 in the RPI and we're probably not going to drop a lot. We're a good basketball team, we've played an extraordinarily difficult schedule. We've played a top -- depending which day you look at it, a top-15 schedule. I think we deserve to be in and we're excited about being in and I just asked the team in the locker room if they wanted to play in the NIT if we get a bid and they said "yep." 15 losses is a lot of losses but we've played a difficult schedule and a nonconference, it would be easy to schedule a couple more wins in the nonconference and everybody wants folks to play good teams. Well, we have. We're playing in the No. 1 RPI league in the country. We're a good basketball team, we just -- doesn't necessarily show by our record, but it does if you look at the scheme of things. Q. Connie, did their guards make it more difficult for you guys to get the ball to Cory? COACH YORI: Yeah, they collapsed, they weren't guarding Tay at all, and Catheryn doesn't get guarded. As the second half wore on, they went more and more to helping on Cory. And when Tay is on the floor, she is a not a 3-point shooter and I thought she created opportunities by going to the glass. And in terms of Catheryn, she has to score around the basket so Cory has -- and that's why I think Cory has had such a great year for us, because when you consider how much she scored with the help that she's got at times around her, she has had a pretty phenomenal year. And at times she had three people around her, and they didn't necessarily hard double her but every time she had the ball, they were sticking a hand in. Q. What have you learned about your team with the adversity in the season? COACH YORI: I love my team. We've got good kids in our program, high character young women and we recruited to make sure that happened and recruited to get kids in our program that we feel like are great people. Adversity reveals your character and we went through a lot of adverse times this year, and we had high expectations coming into the season, as did a lot of teams in the Big 12, but with the injuries that we've had and the things that we've dealt with, I think it says a lot about our players and our program, the kind of character they have to make a push late in the season and stay positive and keep workin'. A lot of teams would have folded, at 1-8 a lot would have folded. And during that stretch we were 5-2 at the end of the year. I like my players, I think they're young women of character. Q. Was there anything, one or two or three things about your team's game that changed down the stretch that enabled you to finish winning five of the last seven going into today? COACH YORI: Well, we've talked a lot about just trying to fight through adverse times and remembering who we are. We did a lot of talkin' and not necessarily because we weren't working hard or playing hard, but just to keep us positive. We looked at the latter part of our schedule and said, hey, there is a lot of winnable games there and I think our players bought into that and saw we could win some games. There is no easy game in the Big 12 in women's basketball, but I thought our schedule softened up a little bit, which enabled us to stay hopeful. I thought just, you know, we talked a lot about having hope. The Texas Tech game we won at home got us going and things rolled from there. If you go 5-2 in this league, that's pretty good, as good as the league is and that's what we did down the stretch. Q. I know there is a chance this one isn't over yet, tell us what you think about the possibilities for next year. You lose one senior, admittedly a good one, but it's one senior, I understand there is a good chance Kelsey could be back next year. It looks like if you don't have the bad luck that you ran into this year, that this could be a strong team next year. COACH YORI: We felt like going into this season like this could be my best team since I've been at Nebraska. With all the players that we had returning and coming off the year that we did last year, and unfortunately things didn't go our way. But at the same time, we're going into next year and hopefully we can finish in the NIT and do some good things and carry that over to positives for next year. We're losing one senior, but we're gaining six players. We're making a six-for-one swap. We signed kids and we have three kids now that had season-ending injuries, so if we stay healthy, we have a chance to be a very good basketball team. Health is something that you can't control and you can see what happened to us this year when we weren't healthy. Q. No matter what led to it is the fact that you looked forward to this season with so much optimism, and it didn't turn out as well as you hoped, could have been disappointing. I thought it's been more along the lines of we have a lot to overcome and we've done it and we're proud of what we've done. COACH YORI: I would agree. In this league every single win is so difficult to come by, and the fact that we were able to come down the stretch and play well, we should feel good about that. And, again, there is two ways to go when you're 1-8. You can hang up the you can hang up the shoes or you can continue to try to compete. And I thought we continued to try to compete and get better in practice and our players stuck together. And, again, that's a credit to our players. I feel good about the way we ended our season in the regular season, and I feel good about what we did today. There is no shame in losing this game, we worked really hard. We tried -- I thought we did a lot of the right things, Kansas played well. We'll strap 'em back on and hopefully we'll get another chance and look forward to ending our season on a strong note. THE MODERATOR: Coach, have a great rest of the season. End of FastScripts |
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