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MOUNTAIN WEST CONFERENCE WOMEN'S TOURNAMENT

March 12, 2010

THE MODERATOR: We're joined by TCU head Coach Mittie and student-athletes. We'll start with an opening comment about the game from Coach Mittie.
COACH MITTIE: Well, I think first off, congratulations to Utah. I thought they played outstanding. You know, they ended the year, I thought, playing very good basketball. We had one of the great games in college basketball all year long against them at their place. Sawyer had a great game today. Rodrigues gave them a big lift.
We looked uncertain early. You know, we just never really got in a flow. I think that's a credit to Utah. I think you'd like to see us as the game went on play better, but we just -- they never allowed us to get many easy looks, and consequently we didn't play very well most of the day.
THE MODERATOR: At this time we'll open it up for questions for the student-athletes.

Q. Was there anything they were doing defensively that you hadn't seen before?
T.K. LaFLEUR: No. I mean, we've seen just about every defense by this time of the year. I just feel that we just didn't execute on offense. We just kind of went into like a relax mode, like it was just going to happen. We never had a sense of urgency to come out and make it happen.
I think that showed. I mean, they played really good defense. They played a really good game tonight. I just feel that we just kind of let it happen to us instead of making it happen.
THE MODERATOR: We'll dismiss the student-athletes at this time. We'll continue with questions for Coach Mittie.

Q. What do you attribute the poor shooting?
COACH MITTIE: Well, I think Utah's defense played excellent, you know. You know, we missed some shots early, so it looked like we tightened up a little bit. Ice had a tough night. That's the first time I've seen Carter have that tough a night. I think T.K. said it pretty well. Early, the first couple, two, three minutes, we looked aggressive. We didn't get some shots to go, we stopped being aggressive. We stopped playing together. Then we forced some things.
A little bit of both. I think Utah's defense was excellent. I thought our execution was poor most of the day. That combination leads to a pretty tough day.

Q. Can you talk about the idea of the fact that they played two games the last couple days and you sat around. Was that any disadvantage?
COACH MITTIE: No. I was glad to be sitting around. It means you won the league.
The thing that was a little challenging for us was we didn't get as much practice times as I would have liked this week. Different things, circumstances. But I thought we kind of survived that. I thought we had a good workout yesterday.
You know, you can go on and on about those things, explanations. I tell the team all the time, I don't want to hear explanations, I don't want to hear excuses. You guys always want explanations. I try to stay away from those things.
I think Utah played excellent. I think they deserve all the credit in the world. I won't judge my team off of one game because I've got a great group. They have worked hard all year long. I don't know if you were at the four-overtime game in Salt Lake. That was a great matchup between two pretty even teams. Utah deserves a lot of credit today.
I've got a good group that didn't play very well. You know, I'm kind of hurting for them right now because they wanted to challenge themselves to see if they could get another championship here, and that's not easy in a good league.

Q. You talked about rebounding was important, you wanted to stay even. You're a smaller team. They had a 15-rebound advantage. Talk about that.
COACH MITTIE: Yeah, you know, let me look at the numbers here. You know, we're even on the offensive glass with 'em, but we miss 41 shots. They only miss 19 shots. And they're still even on the offensive glass.
So we didn't chase the ball very well today. A lot of that was that a lot of our shots were not coming where everybody knew. When offense is clicking, you can see where the shots are coming from, you become a better offensive rebounding team. We didn't have offensive flow all day.
To their credit, they kept us off the glass. If you have better offensive flow, you're going to have more rebounds come your way.

Q. Toward the end of the game, they got flustered. Could you have done that longer in the game, looking back?
COACH MITTIE: We were supposed to. That's part of my frustration with how we just weren't aggressive early in the game because we were supposed to be in the press. You saw at the end of the game on every dead ball situation and every free throw, we were supposed to be that aggressive because we did think we had some advantages there.
Obviously, you asked the question about them playing games. We wanted to turn this into a 40-minute game because maybe their fatigue level. We just never got the game into that style early enough until the very, very end.
I thought at the end of the first half, she was able to rest a few players, Taryn had two fouls, they got her on the bench. She played with a group of subs and still went into halftime up five.
No, we never were able to play with the energy in the first half that we wanted to. We had designed going into the game to say, Okay, not just on free throws, because tournament time you don't get as many free throw opportunities usually, although there were quite a few shot today. We wanted to go on all the dead ball situations as well and we just never had the energy that we needed to have.

Q. (No microphone.)
COACH MITTIE: If the ball goes in the basket, you get to set your defense. If you're missing shots, you're constantly on your heels. Yeah, we just never got the game in the style we needed.
THE MODERATOR: Thank you very much, coach.
COACH MITTIE: Thanks.

End of FastScripts

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MOUNTAIN WEST CONFERENCE WOMEN'S TOURNAMENT

March 12, 2010

T.K. LaFleur

Jeff Mittie