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BIG EAST CONFERENCE WOMEN'S TOURNAMENTMarch 10, 2013Sara HammondJeff WalzHARTFORD, CONNECTICUT Louisville: 62 THE MODERATOR: Louisville wins today, they await the winner of USF Notre Dame and that game tomorrow will be 6 p.m., joining us is head coach, Jeff Walz, along with sophomore forward Sara Hammond, sophomore guard, Bria Smith, Coach? COACH WALZ: I would like to say what a great job Joe has done at St. John's with Eugenia, tearin' her ACL so early in the season, that's one kid I should have recruited harder, she was important to their team and I think Joe has done a great job of getting them to come together and there is no doubt many my mind that they will be able to make a run in the NCAA Tournament as well. For our kids I was pleased with how we started, two embrace the play, and we have been talking about this for a month now. As soon as you start conference tournament and the NCAA Tournament the only way they advanced is they can't call a bunch of fouls, and that's the way I like it. I would rather call it like this the entire year and our kids can get used to it. It's a physical game. You're going to have to finish with contact and that's something I thought we got away from, the last twelve minutes of the first half, we're shooting fade‑aways, and that's when they made their return. We talked about them embracing contact, I thought we started to look for the pack with the ball and that's why we were able to get to the free‑throw line a few more times but we were finishing around the basket and that was important for us. Q. Sara, can you talk about the interior game today and what you took advantage of? SARA HAMMOND: That's what Coach told us, Coach told us to run the floor, get 'em tired and go to work inside because we have the strength and the size advantage. And Coach just preached all week about toughness and physical contact that we can't shy away from it because the refs aren't going to call a foul. We have to use our strength and our advantage and it worked out good for us today. Q. Sara, what was running through your mind after you had 10 points right before the under 16 media time‑out? SARA HAMMOND: I knew I had an advantage because they started four guards and there was a guard guarding me and the coaches prepared us well for that and they told us who was going to be guarding the post and I knew I had to take advantage, I haven't been playing well the last couple of games and I wanted to come out and show everybody that our post players are really good for our team. Q. Coach, what did they do differently after you got off to that 15‑2 start? COACH WALZ: We went 1 for 20 at one point in time in the first half. We are gettin' some great looks and Antonita Slaughter is not going to go 1 for 9 from the field very often and the six she took were wide‑open looks. Joe did a nice job of putting two posts in the game which neutralized our advantage when you have a 5‑8 girl trying to guard Sara that's to our advantage and as soon as he did that we had two posts and the guards struggled tonight from the 3‑point line, we're 2 for 19. When I go back and watch this film 18 of the 19 were probably good shots. We just couldn't put the ball in the basket, but what we did do is we kept guarding and defend and go I thought‑‑ the way it started I was like, hey, if we can keep this going we can put them away but only to be down 3 at half, I was excited about. I was excited about how we came out at halftime, we had two set plays drawn up, one against man and they started off in the zone and we got Antonita Slaughter a layup and that got things going for us. Q. Bria, you know sometimes when some teams come out of byes a little slow, you guys obviously didn't, but it was like a tale of two 10‑minutes in that first half, your coaches mentioned after you came back out after halftime and what he said to you, what were you two saying to one another to counter that St. John's attack because they went to work for a while. COACH WALZ: We just tried to start out in the second half, and I think that's what‑‑ the reason why we won this game is because we kept going on defense, trying to get steals and making it hard for them to get easy shots. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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