Pitt Women's Basketball Postgame Quotes
1/2/2017 12:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
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Pitt Head Coach Suzie McConnell-Serio
Opening Statement:
“We knew coming in that Miami is very talented. They have one of the best backcourts in our league. If you would have told me that we were going to contain them the way that we did tonight, but everyone else stepped up. [Laura] Cornelius had a career-high. They’re just so talented. They don’t skip a beat when players come in off the bench. We had to expend so much energy to defend them, and then we had to expend even more energy to try to break their pressure. I was disappointed that we didn’t handle their pressure as well as I would have liked, and when we did and got good looks, we just didn’t knock down shots. They’re a team that feeds off of their defense, and they just kept coming at us all game long. We didn’t really respond well in the first half. I thought that we came out and at least competed in the third quarter. We challenged them at halftime. That’s all we ask, is that we compete. But I give them credit, they are very, very talented. They have so many weapons, and when you have that many options to score, as a coach, it makes your life a lot easier.”
On Kauai Bradley not starting tonight:
“For whatever reason right now, our expectations of her coming on the floor as a starter was to guard the other teams’ best guard and then expecting her to score. I think it was a lot to ask of her. Early on she was able to do that. I think that once we hit the Purdue game, her numbers just started to decrease, as well as her efficiency. I thought that if we gave her a different role of coming off of the bench and playing free and confident and bringing her into that position, that hopefully she would embrace that. I thought she did okay at times, but we needed some primary ball-handlers. I thought that Cassidy Walsh was giving us some good minutes. We’re struggling at the guard spot right now, across the board. We’re just trying to find answers of having primary ball-handlers on the floor, being able to find shooters, and players that can make entry passes into the post because I don’t care how good our inside game is. We have to have guards that can do a lot of things for us. If we can’t get Brandi Harvey-Carr the ball, if we can’t make entry passes, if we can’t handle the basketball against pressure, we will struggle all year long.”
On what caused her team to have so many turnovers tonight:
“Some of our turnovers were unforced. Sometimes we troubled the ball off of our foot. We got a 10 second call by just not being clock aware. We threw the ball down the sideline, and threw it out of bounds on two different occasions. It’s just a lack of focus for us. That’s why I’m talking about our guard play. During that stretch, we’re calling timeouts, and we’re subbing left and right just to find somebody who can handle the basketball. That’s where our two starting guards with Jasmine Whitney and Aysia Bugg together, having those two handle the basketball, but I think that their [Miami’s] speed and quickness really forced our guards to struggle handling the basketball.”
On the play of Miami guard Laura Cornelius
“It’s the best that I have seen her play. When we talk about a scouting report, she’s a guard that you can’t go under screens on because one of the toughest thing to do is to come off of a non-ball screen and hit threes, and she does it very well. A couple of times we had gone under. Sometimes we were in a zone, and they moved the ball really well and found her. She had a really good game. She’s very talented, we just didn’t defend her the way that we needed to. Their bench had 49 points, and our team scored a total of 50, so their bench almost outscored us. It’s a team that is really deep, and we just didn’t have enough firepower to matchup with them tonight. Once again, without having someone like Yacine [Diop], we didn’t prepare for her to have this injury and not be with us all year. Now that she’s not going to be with us, players need to step up, and they need to produce because there’s no waiting for her to come back and contribute.”
Pitt Forward Brenna Wise
On Miami’s full-court press:
“We did know it was coming. We did prepare for it. We actually put six people on the floor [in practice]. It’s hard to simulate their intensity, but we also made our own mistakes. They made us make mistakes, and we made our own mistakes. Like I just said, we have to learn from it because it’s going to make us better. We’ve got to bring down the turnover ratio.”
On struggling to work the ball into the paint:
“We always say that our defense creates our offense, and it’s tough to create an offense when they’re scoring on your defense. We like to run in transition, that’s our game. We push in transition. Jasmine Whitney does a great job of hitting our post. We have great shooters that run the floor, but it’s tough when you’ve got to go underneath the basket, and they set up in their press. Certainly, we figured out a way in the second half to come out, I think we outscore them in the third quarter. It’s things like that where you just make adjustments. Coach [McConnell-Serio] did a great job of dictating our offense.”
Pitt Guard Jasmine Whitney
On her first experience against ACC competition:
“They’re bigger, the guards are quicker, and their first step is quicker than what I’m used to, but you’ve just got to come in and work. I have to get my footwork right. We’ve just got to defend. That was the biggest thing.”
On guarding Miami guard Laura Cornelius:
“We just tried to do what we could to stop her because it was hard for her to miss tonight. When someone is having that kind of a game, you just do whatever you can to stop them. We made some adjustments in the second half.”
On if they ever felt that the game was out of reach:
“You always want to try to win. No matter what the score is, you’ve got to come out and just keep fighting. That’s what we did in the second half."
Pitt Center Brandi Harvey-Carr
On her first taste of ACC play:
“These girls are actually much bigger than what I’m used to. I was really stepping into a different field of play with bigger girls. I feel like I adjusted to it well. Moving on to the next team, I just have to move more quickly with Boston College. Like Brenna [Wise] said, we can’t let this game define who we are, we just have to move on.”
On what allowed her to have success scoring the basketball:
“Going against the bigger girls, they were very aggressive on me. They were putting a body on me, and I knew that I couldn’t just sit silent in the post and let my teammates get me open. When Jasmine [Whitney] was driving to the basket I was trying to duck in and just trying to stand my ground. I was just trying to either get fouled and take it to the line, or stay in my position and make the basket.”