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SOUTHEASTERN CONFERENCE WOMEN'S TOURNAMENTMarch 6, 2011Victoria DunlapTerri MitchellBernisha PinkettNASHVILLE, TENNESSEE Tennessee – 90 THE MODERATOR: We're ready to begin with Kentucky. We'll take an opening statement from Coach Mitchell. COACH MITCHELL: I want to compliment Tennessee on winning the championship. What a great performance they had. I want to compliment our players on a really, really good run after starting our SEC portion of the season 0-2. To get to today, they put a lot of hard work in. I didn't give them much help today with the game plan. I put them in some bad positions in the press. A lot of that's on me. I'm just really proud that our players got to today. Very disappointed in our performance today. THE MODERATOR: Victoria, your thoughts on today's game? VICTORIA DUNLAP: We came out strong in the first half as a team. And then just in the second half we let up and weren't playing Kentucky basketball. Tennessee took advantage of that. With a team like that, you can't give up things like, that, especially in transition. They kept going with that. The good thing about that is we still have a lot of basketball to play in the NCAA tournament. We're just get to get ready for that. THE MODERATOR: Bernisha? BERNISHA PINKETT: We didn't come out and play our best Kentucky basketball. Tennessee took advantage of that. We still have a lot of practices to go through to get ready for the NCAA and we're going to be ready when that comes. THE MODERATOR: We'll take questions for the student-athletes. Q. Victoria, what happened with your chin? Did you get stiches? VICTORIA DUNLAP: No, just Band-Aids. I fell to the ground. My chin hit the ground. Q. Talk about their three-point shooting. VICTORIA DUNLAP: Well, that's one thing we didn't do well in the first half. We let them get that going from the very beginning. In transition they were getting a lot of open looks and they started hitting them. Built a lot of confidence off of that, kept going. We didn't do any better job of defending it. It just kept happening. BERNISHA PINKETT: Yeah, I just think we wasn't matches up in transition, letting them get wide-open threes. They was getting excited with it and just going after it. Q. Do you think fatigue may have played a part in it? VICTORIA DUNLAP: I don't think so. I mean, you can throw any kind of factor into the game, what might have been happening. We played the same amount of games they played. I think for us we mentally weren't in it, focused as a team in the end. We were thinking about what they were doing. They were getting excited from the crowd, making shots. We were worried about what they were doing instead of working about what Kentucky needed to do. THE MODERATOR: Bernisha, any fatigue issues tonight? BERNISHA PINKETT: No. Q. (No microphone.) VICTORIA DUNLAP: With a team like that, I mean, the basketball game is made up of runs. You can't really focus on that. Just focus on the things that we can control. Just not even think what just happened. Just kind of move forward from that. Q. How much did their length and their size inside impact you guys offensively? Seems like it's harder for you to score against them. I'm sure that's true for everybody. How much did that affect you? VICTORIA DUNLAP: I mean, I guess it can affect a lot of people if you're not used to that size of play. Tennessee has always had a huge lineup height-wise over the years. I mean, if you're not used to it, you kind of have hesitations about when you're going to score, what you're looking at. They kind of have that advantage over us. BERNISHA PINKETT: I mean, they were pretty tall. But if you go in strong and just be physical, I think you can get in there. You just got to look for the open guy. If you don't have nothing, just kick it out to your teammates. I mean, it was quite -- I don't know what I'm trying to say. It was pretty tough. I mean, if you just go in strong, I don't think it was that much of a problem. THE MODERATOR: Ladies, we'll excuse you and continue with questions for Coach Mitchell. Q. Coach, how many ways can Tennessee beat you? Looks like they can do just what they want to do and oppose their will on other teams. COACH MITCHELL: They're a very talented basketball team. I just thought they played really hard tonight. When they shoot the ball well, to me they have to have a chance to be one of the best teams in the country. Of course, we don't see everybody, so I don't want to speak out of turn. But I just can't imagine when they're shooting like they did tonight that, you know, they're not the best team in the country. So they have a lot of weapons. They're so deep. Their kids come in. I think coach has done such a great job, Coach Summitt has done a great job of keeping the chemistry going. A lot of these kids come in and they play varying amounts of minutes in different games. Seems like she's just been able to really keep it together. No matter what the situation is, they're able to get a lot of talented kids on the floor that can play. I just think they're very, very good. When they're on like tonight, they're tough to beat. Q. When you talked about coaching mistakes you made, were you talking about matching up in transition on the three? COACH MITCHELL: Yeah. I think that early in the game we had the pace going pretty good, but we just did not rotate out on three-point shooters. You know, we didn't make a real big emphasis on that. That's maybe where I should have done a better job as a coach, you know, coming out. By the time we started trying to make that adjustment, I don't think our kids were really in tune with that. I just feel badly I didn't prepare them for that particular part of Tennessee's game. But, you know, we had a chance. You think if they're shooting threes in transition, you're kind of getting the pace going, they miss a few of those, you can race it back down the court, but they didn't miss many of them. I didn't think we had them prepared for that part of the game. Q. A'dia had ice packs on her back the entire time you had her sitting. Victoria had her chin nicked up. How important is this week off? COACH MITCHELL: I think it's good. I'm concerned about A'dia. The MRIs didn't show anything. The x-rays didn't show anything. That's good. Hopefully we can get her back spasms calmed down with some treatment. Obviously we didn't have time to get going there. I think when she was in the game, that gives us a better chance to play with Tennessee. When she's limited to 15 minutes, it's really tough. I'm really proud of Megan and Crystal coming in tonight against that tremendous size of Tennessee, great athleticism. I just thought those two kids hung in there, especially Cowright there just played real hard. Tough night for us. I think the time off would really benefit Victoria and A'dia, who had had really good seasons in the SEC. Q. Can you talk about Bernisha, how well she played in terms of trying to get in the mix and battle. COACH MITCHELL: I thought Bernisha had a great tournament. Just proud of that kid. She has overcome a lot in her life to be at this point in time. She's developed into a great student, just a really wonderful young woman. She played real hard. She had to go at the ball for three straight days against some of the best players in the country. So I thought she had a great tournament. Very appreciative of her effort. Today you look at six offensive rebounds, she's about a foot shorter than most folks that are on Tennessee's roster. She was battling in there. Real proud of her individual performance. We just didn't play well as a team today. We just let our offense affect our defense. It's tough. You shoot 27%, it's just hard to get going. But we have to find a way. It's remarkable. We shot under 40% in both of the games to get here. It's pretty remarkable we're here today. It just caught up with us finally today, bad shooting. Q. Going forward, how do you prevent the blow-out here from affecting your mindset? COACH MITCHELL: I just told the team back in the locker room, I was very disappointed in this game today. I didn't want them to think anything but that. I'm very disappointed that we didn't play better, we didn't compete better in this today. Having said that, we've had some tough times this year. We've had some very deflating losses this year. And each time this group has been able to bounce back. So that's just what I shared with them in the locker room. We wanted to cut down the nets today. We wanted to be the champions today. It didn't happen. Another chance for us to bounce back, show the great character these kids have. So I don't think we'll have a problem with that. I believe in them. We'll regroup. We played a really, really fine Tennessee team today that played really well. There's probably a lot of teams in the country that would have had the outcome that we fell to today. Life is tough. The SEC is a lot like life: it will knock you back on your tail sometimes. You just have to battle through. So I'm not worried about that with our bunch. Our kids have a lot of good qualities and a lot of character. I wouldn't trade places with Coach Summitt right now for anything. Q. At times it was a little bit physical out there. Did that work against you, given you were the smaller team on the floor? COACH MITCHELL: You know, I think that you have to really try to figure out what you can do to impact the game. I just didn't think we played as tough as we would need to play. When you are a little bit challenged there from a physical standpoint as far as Tennessee's size and athleticism, you really have to - as we say in Mississippi - you have to bow up and play a little bit tougher. That was the thing that was most disappointing to me. Once we see it's going to be a tough, physical game, generally we respond a little bit better. That's a disappointing part of it. I have no control over anything but trying to get our kids to play real hard. When we don't against a good Tennessee team, you get a result like today. So the physical play, we had a chance to get as physical as them, and we didn't do it. So that's a credit to Tennessee. THE MODERATOR: Coach Mitchell, thank you very much. COACH MITCHELL: Thank you. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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