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SOUTHEASTERN CONFERENCE WOMEN'S TOURNAMENTMarch 10, 2013Kristi BellockGary BlairKelsey BoneCourtney WalkerDULUTH, GEORGIA Texas A&M – 75 THE MODERATOR: We're joined by Texas A&M head coach Gary Blair and student‑athletes Courtney Walker and Kelsey Bone. We'll start with an opening comment from Coach Blair. COACH BLAIR: That was a great game for television, just like anytime you have an SEC Championship. The SEC is back, okay? The SEC is back. I know we were in the Big 12 and we thought we were the best back then. Probably Baylor is on the court right now. But the SEC, with the tournament that we had here, with the quality and the depth of this league, it's going to be special in years to come. The outstanding freshmen that are in the league, we'll lose a few good seniors, but look what's coming back. I'd like to thank the SEC conference staff, all the people that have helped us here. We were treated with hospitality. Everything was great. It's hard to beat us three times. I think our team will say Kentucky is just great. Here is the difference. Kentucky played 40 minutes both games. We played 37 both times we lost. I know Walker made that comment. She said, We knew if we played 40 minutes, they couldn't stay with us. Our kids took that to heart. That's a good comment for Walker to make, but it's not a good comment for us to read because we felt like we could play 40 minutes with the best of 'em. Transition offense was the difference in the game. Even though we turned the ball over some, we made some horrible mistakes sometimes in the second half, but we got the easy baskets, we didn't allow them to play that great halfcourt defense which they possibly can. Pratcher and Jones did a great job of dissecting. Gilbert hung on in the first half for us while we had Bone in foul trouble. Bone did her thing in the second half, along with my two freshmen, and my unsung hero Kristi Bellock. We're happy. We're still dancing. We're ready to go home, rest a little, get ready for the tournament at our place. THE MODERATOR: We'll take questions for the student‑athletes. Q. Kelsey, did you take personal the fact that you were in foul trouble in the first half? KELSEY BONE: Actually it was a twofold thing for me. Both times we played Kentucky previously, I've had terrible, terrible cramps going into the second half. I felt like that kind of caused or took a little edge off of us. When I'm sitting on the bench, eight minutes in the first half, I still have 20 minutes left in my tank. It's probably was a blessing in disguise. It's a testament to my team and to the depth that we have, that I can sit on the bench for eight minutes, and we're only down by two points. It's not like they opened up this lead and we had to come back and fight. We were only down two points. I felt like we had taken their best shot and we had not thrown our best punch yet. I felt like we were ready. Q. Kristi, can you talk about your mindset? Your versatility, transition baskets. To talk about your mindset today. KRISTI BELLOCK: I wanted to come out with a lot of energy. This was the last game for the championship, so it's either give it all I got or go home. I did kind of take what they said to heart. The last game I didn't have good post defense, so I took that to heart and I wanted to make them look like the bad post defense. I ran the court every time. When I got tired, I asked for a sub, came back in and kept running. THE MODERATOR: Run, Forest, run (laughter). Q. For any of you guys, what was the effect of losing the Big 12 championships had to you being able to win the SEC this year? KELSEY BONE: It's funny, I looked at Kristi last night, sitting in the hotel lobby, doesn't it feel good preparing for a tournament conference game and not having to worry about Baylor. Every year we've gotten to championship games and had to play Baylor. You know, irregardless of who our opponent was going to be today, we came in, we lost four games, lost four of our last five games. I think sometimes you need a little bit of failure to wake you back up sometimes. Those four games, they really refocused us and I think it changed our mindset. If we just listen to our coaches, play hard, execute the game plan, we're a dangerous, dangerous team. THE MODERATOR: Kristi. KRISTI BELLOCK: It's very special to me because this is my first time playing. This is also my last time playing. I'm just excited that we got the trophy. I'm excited because we did it on our own. We didn't have the Sydney Carters and Tyras and Danielles. We did it with our seniors and with Kelsey. Q. Kelsey, does this mean anything extra to you after playing a year in the SEC? KELSEY BONE: It's a storybook ending for me. I fell in love with the Southeastern Conference as a little girl and I always wanted to play in the Southeastern Conference. That was a lot of the reason why I made my initial decision. Going back to the Big 12, then, boom, I'm back here in the SEC. That doesn't happen to everybody who transfers. I'm probably the only person who can ever say that. For me, this is about my team. We could still be in the Big 12. We could be in the Big Ten. It didn't really matter. I'm happy, having fun with the group of girls that I go to practice and line up with every day. We're just having fun. When we're having fun, we're a hard team to beat. Q. Kristi and Kelsey, can you talk about your freshman Courtney Walker. Talk about her play, especially being a freshman. KRISTI BELLOCK: Courtney Walker is amazing. She's our energy player when everyone else doesn't make shots, Coach Blair calls her number, she steps up every time. I'm happy we got her on our team. We love her like a sister. I hope she keeps doing what she's doing for the rest of this season. That's making me very happy. KELSEY BONE: Courtney is actually my roommate on road trips. We spend a lot of time together. That's my kid. I mean, I'm like her mother. I do her hair. I wake her up. That's my kid. So to see her out here, I mean, she's everywhere. We expect her to guard the other team's best player. She's guarding an All‑American in A'dia Mathies, and we're expecting her to score. That's not easy for a senior, let alone a freshman. When she's coming in, giving us all this energy, we can't help but feed off of what she does. It seems like every time Coach Blair calls her number, she delivers. She does her homework, it's the weekend, I'm like, What are you doing? Homework. But she's ready to play. She's playing 38 minutes, 40 minutes a game most of the time. She makes us better. When she's out there doing all the things that she does, I'm like, I've got to get this rebound for her because she's giving her it all. COACH BLAIR: Is she going to get you to switch over to engineering? KELSEY BONE: Not anytime soon. Q. Courtney, talk about your learning curve this year. Talk about how much you've learned through the court of this season. COURTNEY WALKER: I learned a lot playing Kelsey and the seniors, really the whole team. We had to come in early, he told us, with me and C. Will starting, we had to come in and give it our all and produce really. When I came in, he told me most of the time I'd be guarding the best player, I think it's a mindset. That's the biggest thing I've had to change from last year to this year is being completely ready for the game and knowing what you opponent wants to do and being able to take that away, because All‑Americans, you can't really stop, you just have to focus on containing them, taking away what they want to do. Really on offense, giving it my all, working on being able to defend, going to the other end and trying to produce, or at least make a play and make a stat in the books to give my team something to score or whatever we need to keep winning. Q. Kelsey, can you talk about how much Coach Blair means to you. You had a conversation with him about playing for your grandmother. Elaborate on how much he means to you. KELSEY BONE: My grandfather coached in Texas way back in the day. Coach Blair started mentioning some names, and he and my grandfather ran in the same circles. Coach Blair has meant a lot to me. I had an okay season. A lot of people gave up on me. She's a flop. She was good in high school. She's not going to pan out in college. Coach Blair just stuck with me. It would have been easy for Coach Blair to use me in a different kind of way this year. But we had a conversation. He said, I need you to lead my team. I took that to mean whatever he needed me to do. I felt like if I could be the one person that Coach Blair didn't have to worry about with seven freshmen on the team, we'd be ahead of the curve. With that being said, I just had an epiphany. My grandmother died four days after I turned four. She was my everything. When things get tough for me, I think about her. And tonight, it would have been easy for us to kind of cave in. But I'm playing for something bigger. There are bigger things pushing. We have this amongst our team. It's called, What's your why? When things are getting bad, Coach Blair is chewing us out, Coach Starkey or Coach Bond or Coach Wright will say, what's your why? They'll just walk by in passing, not anything major, each person on our team has one. When we were going through that four‑game streak, we did that. Everyone kind of, What's your why? My grandmother is my why. That's a why that I'll never lose because I know she'll always be there for me. THE MODERATOR: We'll go ahead and take questions for Coach Blair. Q. Your previous time in the SEC obviously gives you a better ability to place some perspective on Texas A&M doing this in your first year in the league. COACH BLAIR: Well, the first thing, I'm coming in with more ammunition on the playing court. I've got a very good team, even though we're young in spots, but we have veterans in leadership roles. The SEC, when I was there for 10 years, was undoubtedly the best league. You had Hall of Fame coaches, Olympic players, All‑Americans. Then in the last nine years, there had been a lot of changes in the SEC. The only person that's left is Andy Landers, and Melanie Balcomb was just there for one of my years. We're trying to build up, you're only as good as your coaches. We had graduated so many great coaches in this league that it built programs up. Coming back, when I went into the Big 12, we tried to play SEC defense because I couldn't play Big 12 offense. My players weren't good enough. So I had to play SEC defense for survival. That's what I learned in my 10 years at Arkansas to be able to play. That's how we built the team. Because the McDonald's All‑Americans and the great players were not going to come to us. We had to build it with kids that were good recruits, but not great recruits. They turned into great people that could do great things. That's how we built our program. Now I've even got McDonald's All‑Americans. It's fun to coach them because their offensive skills are generally a lot better. We shot 47% tonight. How did we do that? We shot 16 out of 25 from the paint. We held their two post players, basically 1‑5 and 4‑12. That was the difference in the ballgame. We knew we had to win it on the inside because their perimeter defense was so good. I built this program with defense, but now we've got the offense to go with it. Q. You've won national championships. You may the SEC is back. COACH BLAIR: Singular, sir. Q. National championship. You say the SEC is back. What does winning this tournament do for you guys for the NCAA tournament moving forward? COACH BLAIR: It's going to give us a boost in attendance Monday morning. I'm going to be out selling tickets, too. It's during our spring break, but I expect people to buy tickets. Hey, we finished second in the league in attendance in conference play, third overall. But we were second above Kentucky in conference play. So we got a great fan base. But I'm never satisfied. I want to build it up. Last year we were second in the sub‑regionals and all the 16 to Notre Dame. We had great attendance there. Texas A&M, it's an all‑purpose school. We're not just a football school, we're not just Johnny Manziel, John David Crow. We win in everything. Every sport we win. But what this means, it's our first SEC Championship. We've got individual championships which we've already won. We've got west divisions. Well, there's no divisions in basketball. We inherited the hardest schedule in the SEC in conference play, okay?  It's a random little deal. Guess what, welcome to the SEC. I get Kentucky twice, Vanderbilt twice and LSU twice. It made us tougher. So we were on the aisle saying, All right, we'll take what you are gonna give us. We're 5‑1 on road games until we lost our last two at Vanderbilt and Tennessee, two pretty good teams. We're going to give to the SEC what the SEC always needs. It needs that western team also to be a recruiting base for all the sports. Texas has got a lot of folks. It doesn't matter if you're equestrian or gymnastics or what, Texas is loaded with talent, just like Florida is. It's opening up the doors for other schools to come in. We'd like to close the doors sometimes, there's more than enough. I'm happy to be a part of it. I'm in this thing not to win games, but to win championships and compete for championships. I've lost a lot of championships, but I've won a lot, too. You build your program with your staff. Folks, I hire good people and I work 'em like slaves and I give responsibility out, then I give 'em the love afterwards. But my staff has been very, very special over the years. This is one of the best staffs I've ever had. Coach Starkey's defense is tremendous, just like what Coach Schaefer used to do for us a different way. So instead of me going in and trying to change a Coach Starkey to coach like Coach Schaefer, no, I adapted to Coach Starkey. I said, Your system has been good enough at LSU, bring your system in. The only one thing I asked, I believe in pressure, because we eat pressure for breakfast at Texas A&M. He incorporated that. More of a gap defense. But it works. It's very good. We held another team to 35% again. Q. You talked about having the hardest SEC schedule. Can you talk about how that, coupled with playing Penn State, UConn, Louisville, Notre Dame, all out of conference, prepped you for this run? COACH BLAIR: It really prepped us. A lot of people were calling me crazy when I did that schedule. I wanted to build up our fan base.  We're still educating people towards women's basketball. It's a nationwide problem, particularly with students coming to ballgames. Tennessee has 14,000 in, but they only had 300 students. If we have 7,000 in, we might only have 300 to 400 students. That's an area we want to grow in, is getting the students to come to ballgames. What was the rest of your question? Q. How is this going to make you guys ready for the tournament? COACH BLAIR: Hey, when you go against Geno, you get ready in a hurry or you get embarrassed. We got embarrassed. Don't you worry. We'd love to have another crack to show them how much we've improved because both of us have a lot of respect for each other. At the same time I lost to Louisville, I lost to Penn State, two games we were very much in. After that, we just grew as a basketball team. I trusted my freshmen. I let 'em grow up with their mistakes. When you got a horse like Bone, you learn how to ride her. You got to get in her head. She's a junky for basketball. She can tell you every WNBA player, NBA player, everything about sports. Some are listening to music, she's watching sports. She's going to be an outstanding coach someday if she isn't a broadcaster first. It was just special. Here is one thing I challenged Kelsey with. On the board I put seven keys for the game. Nothing about points. I said give me 15 boards, give me 10 defensive ones, 5 offensive ones, give me 5 assists, play great defense. Look what their post players did. Between her and Bellock, they shut them down. She got me 10 defensive boards, she got me five offensive boards, she owes me an assist, and I'll ask for it next time 'cause she only got four. It's just fun. People say, Why don't you retire, go play golf every day. Well, my golf game is not as good as my coaching. It's not bad. But I'm going to coach for a long time, all right? So I'm here for the duration. If you're still good at what you're doing, if you got a great place to sell like Texas A&M, why retire? I'm horrible at honey‑do's I don't want to do that. I want to coach young people. Q. Can you talk about handling Walker's ball pressure today. Talk about the job she did handling the pressure today. COACH BLAIR: Well, the one thing that I'm different than most coaches, if you look all over the years, our assist/turnover ratio has been some of the best in the country. The reason, I'm a set coach, not a motion coach. Why do I want to put the ball in the hands of people that are average passers? I want the ball in the hands of the kid that's going to make the decision. Walker has turned into a very good assist person. Courtney Williams is very good. Bellock has done a good job. At the same time I run sets. When sets don't work, sometimes we break down and we get into a flow motion and more people touch the ball. But she wants the ball. She wants the ball. Jordan is coming in giving us a little bit of energy. She'll be running the show next year. But Pratcher, remember, Standish quit, my starting point guard, December the 5th or something like that. Pratcher just said, Give me the ball. We gave her the ball. She stood up. Our chemistry is better. Everything is better. Sometimes you have addition by subtraction. It worked this time. THE MODERATOR: Coach, thank you very much. COACH BLAIR: Thank you all. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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