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NCAA WOMEN'S NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPDecember 15, 2012Alaina BergsmaLiz BrennerKatherine FischerJim MooreLOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY Texas – 3 THE MODERATOR: We'll begin with an opening statement from Coach. COACH MOORE: Congratulations to Texas. They played awesome. They played very, very well. Blocked great, passed great, and they deserve well‑earned victory for them. I mean, they played very, very well. I guess I can say this now, to them, the‑‑ so they don't have to answer all the questions, I guess, at least to begin with, what happened is when people ask me, one, Texas played great, played very well. And, you know, if we were going to be successful tonight, we knew we had to serve tough. Kudos to Texas passing. But we didn't apply any pressure serving. It just didn't‑‑ it just wasn't there. There's times that it just doesn't come. And we just‑‑ I thought we served to the middle of the court all the time. Depth didn't change very much. We just didn't apply any pressure serving. And if we were going to be successful, we would have had to apply a lot of pressure serving. And I think we missed some early and just didn't come out, and that made it really, really hard. It made it impossible. If we weren't going to apply pressure serving, it made it impossible. They stayed in system, and credit to their passing. But we applied no pressure there. And so what we're hoping is taking them out of system, dig balls, transition and get it on the floor, and they applied pressure by blocking. And can you say that the‑‑ a block obviously is a big deal, but it was a big deal last night, too, and Thursday night, and we were successful. But we just didn't serve tough. And it's going to be real hard to beat that team, if you don't serve tough. THE MODERATOR: Questions for the student‑athletes. Q. Kat, you had a lot of success tooling that block. You had a lot of success finding holes in that block. Why? What was going on? You really had a lot of kills, and you were finding a way to get kills. KATHERINE FISCHER: I think a lot of that came from their worry about Alaina. When I'm up with Alaina, usually she gets two blockers, I get one. So that came‑‑ I got the success because of that. And then I also liked tooling the block, that's what I do to get kills. So it was working tonight. Q. Coach did mention, Alaina, I'll start with you, your inability as a team to serve to them. But their serves looked really tough. There was a lot of short serves, and then you had‑‑ I think it's No.14, I'm sorry, I don't remember her name, who had that really wicked bullet serve. What was it about their serving that made a difference for you? ALAINA BERGSMA: I mean, they're a good serving team, but I think we passed really well tonight. I mean, they're obviously a tough serving team. But I thought our passing was there. Q. Alaina, were you having trouble with their block? Was that one of the harder challenges you had as far as the opponents this year? ALAINA BERGSMA: I think we've seen a lot of big blocks. Didn't make good choices, and I made more errors, because you're going to get blocked. They're a good blocking team. Run a fast offense, you're going to get blocked. But I made more hitting errors than I normally do. Q. Liz and Kat, would you both comment on the fact that the Final Four comes to the northwest next year, whether that makes any difference for both of you as players returning? Liz, would you start, and, Kat, would you finish? LIZ BRENNER: Kat's a senior. Q. Liz, please talk about the Final Four being in the northwest just right up the road. Does that make any difference to you right now? LIZ BRENNER: Right now it doesn't. I mean, obviously we're going to have to play next year and play and get there first. So it doesn't really matter where it's going to be, try to get there first. KATHERINE FISCHER: I'm a senior, but I'd love to have it in the northwest. I'll be working in Portland. I'd love to go cheer on the Ducks up there. Q. Alaina, all things considered, if you could put in perspective the season you had and honors you had and to get this far? ALAINA BERGSMA: Obviously it didn't end the way we wanted it to. But I think we proved a lot of people wrong on this, I mean, this adventure to the finals, breaking a lot of Oregon records. Hopefully we set the bar really high and the teams can just continue to build on our success. Q. Liz, back to you. A lot of teams, when they're under stress in this tournament, and opponents of yours, begin to do a lot of tipping, begin to do a lot of sort of easy stuff. You didn't let your foot off the pedal in any of these matches, including tonight. Do you consciously do that? Did you feel you had that ability to do that tonight, to just hit at every opportunity instead of resorting to tips and other things? LIZ BRENNER: I think that's definitely part of my game, is what makes me effective is how powerful I am and how hard I can hit the ball. And that's what I go to and that's what I do. So, no, I saw my opportunities and I got good swings, so I went for it. Q. Liz and Katherine, about the season, obviously this was a great season for the program, and if you could just talk about your emotions about the season right now? KATHERINE FISCHER: This is definitely one of the biggest disappointments of my life. Like I've played my entire life trying to get here, and we got here and we didn't perform. This is a great journey. I'm really proud of us, everything we've accomplished. We've worked really hard. Just hard to take. ALAINA BERGSMA: It's been a really fun season with this group, and speaking on behalf of the team, we're going to miss our four seniors a lot next year, but I'm going to do everything I can to work with our girls to get us back to the Final Four. Q. Kat, how much of that opening set was just nerves? And then how much of it was kind of their physical dominance as well? KATHERINE FISCHER: I would say it was mostly nerves. We all wanted it really, really badly, and sometimes that can get in the way of your play. I think it did for us. But after that we knew we could play with them and we stuck with them, so we did well after that. THE MODERATOR: Thank you. Questions for Coach. Q. Jim, can you comment on Bailey Webster's play for Texas tonight and the difficulty in trying to stop her? COACH MOORE: Yeah, we knew she was going to be‑‑ obviously we knew she was going to be difficult to defend. She played great. And two things: I for sure will take responsibility and I‑‑ well, first I'll apologize to you. I'm usually the guy that talks too much, and I know yesterday I said nothing and I may have calmed us down too much. And so everyone who does know me knows I'm an emotional guy. I think the reason we fight the way we fight is because that's sort of my personality. But so I think I really tried to stay calm, and that may have taken us out. That would be the first set. And I also will say that I went back and forth on a defensive decision, and looks like‑‑ we made the wrong decision on what defense is starting. We dug more balls in Game 3 I think that were there, and we should have been in that defense right from the beginning. So that was a bad choice of mine as well. But, again, they played really well. And she's a physical specimen. Q. What was that defense, more specifically, that you wish you had done all the way through? COACH MOORE: We have four different defenses out there named. We just have them by numbers. So we started with a semi rotation defense and we switched to our standard defense basically after Game 2. So it's just location on the court in terms of‑‑ we had adjustments for both, and we had adaptations for both Bailey and for Eckerman, and it was too hard in the first one, obviously, and the second one I do think we dug more balls. But it was too late by that point. Q. I hate to ask you this question, but I want to get the answer. You know what this championship means to Texas. Can you talk maybe a little bit that from your perspective having been there? COACH MOORE: It means a lot to me. I don't know what it means to Texas. I'm not there. I know that Katherine Fischer, when she said what she said, she stood as a freshman, and I asked the question, when she was a freshman, and we were just talking about different things, I said: What do you want out of life? Kind of talking to everybody on the team. Heather Meyers, who was one of our players, pretty much a jokester, she said she wanted a house on the beach. People were saying things like that. Katherine as a freshman said: I want to be a national champion. And this is really hard. So I don't know what it means to Texas; I know that it hurts for us to lose it. Q. When people evaluate this match, they're going to look at that second set. You were up 23‑21. And really you haven't had a chance to talk about Eckerman's play. What was she doing that you were not able to counter, especially at the end of that second set? COACH MOORE: She had the one serve that‑‑ it comes down to serving and passing. And she aces‑‑ they only had two aces, and one of them was right there as they're coming back. And I kept‑‑ you can only make so many adjustments. I said: We need to scoot up on her serve. And I do know that it's difficult on somebody on a jump serve to scoot up. But she was spinning it short, and we didn't make that adjustment. She got one of those aces right there. And that was just bad timing, because saying we need to scoot up, we need to scoot up, and we weren't scooting up. That was a little frustrating. Q. And her hitting? COACH MOORE: Her hitting was great. We knew the two of them were going to put balls on the floor. Again, if you go back to that situation we had when we were up 23‑21, we were doing the things that we wanted to do. I keep my own stats a little bit separately. But we had 20 kills in that. 23points. 20 kills. I don't know what else we need to do. Maybe it was 24points, 21 kills, something like that. But we just didn't execute it the right moment. Q. I'm the hometown paper. I apologize for making all these comments. But would you respond, though, to the fact for you that after you get through all of this, the Final Four is in your backyard, will that be a motivation? Is that a distraction? Is that something that you hope your fans are aware of? What do you think? COACH MOORE: I think the most difficult thing on the planet is to repeat. And whether it's winning, whether it's being here again, it is going ‑‑ kid sitting next to me is pretty good. How we replace her, I don't know. And Kat wouldn't have been starting‑‑ I thought here's Kat hitting .375 in a national championship final. Again, I said it earlier in the week, she proved that she can play at this level, and I'm so proud of her to be able to do that. And we lose our libero. Haley's awesome. And so we have a lot of work to do to even think about that it happens to be in Seattle. THE MODERATOR: Thank you, Coach. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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