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BIG TEN CONFERENCE WOMEN'S MEDIA DAYOctober 31, 2013Pam BortonCHICAGO, ILLINOIS THE MODERATOR: Next up Minnesota head coach Pam Borton entering her 12th season, returning 7 letter winners and four starters from last year as NIT game that won 18 games. PAM BORTON: It's great to be here, obviously excited to start the season. Love my team this year. Do not have to coach work ethic, effort, and it's absolutely wonderful so it's great to be here, excited to start the season. Q. I got a story from a while ago that says Rachel Banham had surgery on her knee. How much was a problem were the knees for her last year? PAM BORTON: She is‑‑ I think she was in constant pain last year. She has been in pain for two years and a lot of tendonitis and the doctors tried something and it didn't work so she played through the season in pain. Nothing structurally wrong. This year they went in and it was more invasive and relieved the pain so she is for the most part pain free and you can tell she is in better shape than she was last year. Last year she went through the blood clot thing in the summertime and this year the knee thing a little bit. So she is in better shape and hopefully that will play out on the court as well. Q. How much does Riche's role change going from power center to forward? PAM BORTON: I think it changes a great deal, less time on the block and more in the pinch post area. I think her role changes as far as how she gets her points this year. I think the whole team and her are still going through the adjustment but a month down the road it will pay dividends. I think she is going to be one of the best power forwards in the Big Ten, with Amanda Zahui, has a chance to be one of the best centers in the Big Ten and Amanda there and I think she is still getting comfortable with her role. Q. Coach, I know you have been working on getting Amanda to feeling like she can be a major contributor. What has that process been like? PAM BORTON: I think it started when she came in in Decemberlast year. She got into practice, got into the flow, learned the system and the expectations and what they were. Coming into summer, summer access helped us get on the court with her. But she is a different kid. She is from Stockholm. She had a lot of pro opportunities over seas and it's a breath of fresh air to be around a kid like that. She thinks like a pro. She has innate leader qualities. She is probably one of the best leaders on our team. She is 20 years old. She gets it. Thinks like a pro, other kids you have to pull in and schedule them to watch film. This kid is in our office watching film every day, she makes adjustments and learns quick and it's really a breath of fresh air, like I said to be able to coach a 20 year old that is thinking like a pro. Q. Can you describe her style of play? What type of a post player is she? PAM BORTON: Extremely versatile. 6‑5, she has very good size, athletic, she is a great post passer, tough to handle inside because she is so big. She is great around the rim, she can hit threes, your typical European post player with great size. When you have the athleticism, the skills, the patting ability, she can shoot from the perimeter and she can score around the rim. She is a great leader and thinks like a pro. I think we've got the full package. She is not perfect, she has to work on her footwork, got to learn to use her body and she was double and triple teamed the whole night and was able to put up some really good numbers. Q. Coach, last season there were things you were trying to get your team to do all year, I know you had troubles on the defensive end. As you look back, what are things you have to do better? PAM BORTON: I think you hit the nail on the end. Our issues were the defensive end. Offensively I think we had one of the better teams than we've had in a number of years, second in free‑throw percentage, 3‑point shooting percentage, our numbers were good offensively, but defensively is where you drop a couple of games because you've giving up 44%, you've giving up 72 points a game. I think it was a lot of different things. If it's limiting possessions, it's better to be on the boards, keeping people off the free‑throw line, I think we fouled too much last year, 19 fouls per game, which is discipline. I think some of those kids have graduated, but I think protecting the rim and not giving up easy shots at the rim, I thought we were small last year. Just our kids buying into the way we need to play defense. We have always had great defensive teams and struggled offensively but finding a balance and getting our kids to buy in and start having fun playing on the defensive end will solve a lot of ills. Q. I'm coming out of WNBA land, but obviously the Minnesota Lynx have had a great deal of success and with McCarville back playing alongside Lindsey, the target center has been great in supporting women's basketball. Talk about how that supports your program. PAM BORTON: Helps to have two former players down the street playing about a mile and a half away and they're excited to be here and playing for their fans and their city. You know, they were excited to be playing together again, on the Lynx, bringing back the memories and the plays that those two had together, the around the leg passes and you sit back and smile because, yep, that's easy to coach. Those players are easy to coach because you sit back and don't screw things up, you let 'em play. Our fans, they love them, it's a show when you watch them play. There is so much talent, there are three Olympians on the floor with the flair and the style that they play it's fun to watch. I just think the fans were engaged. They will be a great carry over from the two or three weeks that the fans have had off from the links going into Gopher season, so I think people that love college basketball and love student athletes, it's very different. Our athletes' days are different than the pro's, but our fans are engaging. We have some of the best fans in the country and it will be a lot of fun! I wish I had a few of their players. We all do! Q. Coach, you mentioned your team last year defensively a lot of fouls and concerns about that aspect of the game. With all the new rules, the new points of emphasis, how are you address that go with your team? Are you doing anything specifically different to ensure that's not an issue for you this season? PAM BORTON: I think it's a lot about the player, the individual player, the lack of discipline that they have. I think we have more options this year as far as the players that we put on the floor. But, you know, I think it's how we teach it, with we have to talk about it, get them to buy in. I think we have done a good job as a staff just teaching the hands off, I think that's a big thing. Just calling everything in practice, a lot of emphasis, talking about it. I think for this generation, coaching millennium kids, it's different, different than coaching kids five or six years ago and going into the season they want to see numbers. They're not going to say, hey, we got to be better than this, we're beyond that, you're coaching a different kid. They want to see numbers, graphs, pie charts, so we put numbers together and put numbers together with where we were offensively last year as a team, very impressive, top 20 in the country scoring, toward the top of the Big 10 and then you put the numbers defensively together the number of fouls, where we were, where we ranked in the country and in the Big Ten and it's eye‑opening. Numbers don't lie. Film doesn't lie and I think that hit home to the players when they he see the positives and then they see all the negatives on the other side and it's like, we gotta fixed in this. I think that's a big way you get kids in this generation to buy in. Numbers don't lie, film doesn't lie. We spent time watching film this year. We spend time watching film 15 or 20 minutes before practice, a lot of times we don't show film well in exhibition games or scrimmages and this year we watch 15 minutes of film of themselves in practice and it's helped our players see a little bit of reality on how they need to get better and not just saying things or talking about it but they get to see it and see how good they look or bad they look. I think that it's been able to help them fixed in their mistakes quicker than us just sounding like a broken record. THE MODERATOR: Coach, best of luck this season. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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