Kentucky Head Coach Matthew Mitchell
Opening statement…
“Tough game today, and I think you have to give a lot of credit to South Carolina. They’re an awfully tough team there. They’re very talented, well coached and such a great defensive team, make it hard on you to score. Thought they really hustled. I thought we had some chances at some critical points but just couldn’t make a bucket. But I thought if you look at it over the course of 40 minutes, I think there was some tremendous effort from our team as well so it’s always disappointing to lose and we’re going have to do what we’ve done every time this year and bounce back from a defeat and go get a victory Thursday night so that’s what we’ll have our mind on.”
On what team needs to do to ensure top seed in the tournament…
“I think we have to be encouraged that in critical moments, we did the right things, shots just didn’t fall so I just talked to them. We just have to get back in the gym Tuesday with the most positive attitude and have complete belief in ourselves and go out there and just prepare really well for what’s a tough game Thursday night against Georgia, but we will learn from where we made our mistakes today and try to get better. But, I thought we fought hard.”
On Kentucky’s improve movement sense first South Carolina game…
“That was a real wake up call for us, we just didn’t show up very well that night and it was real blessing at the time, a real gift that we were given because we had to quickly lock in on our identity at that point in time and we had to get much tougher and we had to get much more focused and zeroed in on having a fierce, competitive spirit and so that was a great opportunity to learn so you can either let one of those kind of games really shake you or you can rise up and get better and I think our team certainly was able to rise up and get better over the course of the season, it’s a been a long time since January 2. I think we’ve made a lot of improvement and I thought we fought hard today in some critical points to get back in the game when South Carolina would make a run, so I thought you saw some toughness from our team today and we certainly are not pleased at the result or how we played but we have to continue to focus on how can we be a successful team and a big ingredient in that is being physically tough and mentally tough. I thought there was a time where we welted a little bit in the first quarter and sort of stopped playing there for a couple of minutes and gave them some pretty easy buckets and I was real proud we were able to get it together. We got it together and came back and tried to work hard throughout the game so just learn from all the things that went wrong today and get better, but understand we have to remain tough and keep fighting for one of the top four seeds.”
On how Kentucky can be successful going forward…
“We need to focus on how we can be a successful team. A big ingredient on how we can be a successful team is being physically tough and mentally tough. I thought there was a time where we wilted a little bit in the first quarter and sort of just stopped playing there for a couple of minutes, and we gave them some pretty easy buckets. I was real proud that we were able to get it together. We were able to get it together, and we came back and tried to work hard throughout the game. So, just learn from all the things that went wrong today and get better but understand that we have to be tough and keep fighting for one of those top-four seeds.”
On Dawn Staley saying Kentucky controlled the tempo the entire game…
“Well, one big key where they just had an avalanche on us was points off turnovers, and we didn’t take care of the basketball in Columbia, and so I thought we were much better today in some of those stats. We were much tougher with the ball and I thought we were much more patient with the basketball. We didn’t score enough buckets, but you did see us at the end of the clock sometimes, making a big play that helped us hang in there. A bad shot versus South Carolina is really like a turnover, is what we try to tell our players. If you go in, and you’re off balance, and you’re knocked to the floor. They are so great in transition, and now you’re not balanced on transition defense, and they just can absolutely get going. I thought it was really important for our team to make good, on-balanced shots and limit our exposure to runs by taking bad shots and letting that fuel their transition offense. I think we certainly did a better job than we did January 2, but it still wasn’t good enough. We just have to stay at it and keep fighting and see if we can get better.”
On the crowd…
“Great crowd, incredible crowd. We need another one on Thursday. We have five really special seniors, it’s a very special senior class for us. We will be highly motivated to win. The crowd today was just terrific, they got behind us all-day long and I appreciate that. I can’t tell you how much we care about this group of seniors and a big crowd in their seats early would be a great way to send out a group of seniors that’s worked hard for us.”
Kentucky Student-Athletes
#10 Rhyne Howard, G, So.
On what the team can take away from this game…
“We can take away that we can show that we can compete with them. They are number one in the country, but I think we did a lot of good things today and that is the thing that we need to focus on. Even with the things we didn’t do too well, we can just refocus and work on those.”
On how much your injured finger was a problem…
“Well, I don’t have a good grip with my left hand but I just have to push through it and be able to play and stay tough for my teammates.”
On when the splint should be coming off…
“I go to get more x-rays this week and hopefully it is good enough to go to a smaller splint. But I will probably be in a splint for the rest of the season.”
#32 Jaida Roper, G. Sr.
On South Carolina working the ball inside…
“Credit to South Carolina, they are a really good team. They have some great players on that team. We just made a decision to buckle down and try to defend the dribble-drive, help out our bigs, dig in the post a little bit. We just have to go to work and get better.”
On the team’s response to a tall South Carolina team…
“We just tried to stay aggressive. We were trying to attack, find a mismatch, find Rhyne (Howard) off staggers, give her the ball. We had some trouble with their length. They’re really quick guards, really long posts but I feel that we can work around that. We can get better and just execute better.”
South Carolina Head Coach Dawn Staley
On how South Carolina was able to break after the first quarter and how UK responded to that…
“I thought that, at the beginning of the game, we weren’t pushing the ball. Kentucky had a lot to do with that, and they were zone pressing, and they were forcing us to slow down a little bit. We tried to just tell our team it’s token pressure. It’s not really that they’re trapping, they’re just trying to slow us down and not allow us to push the ball down the floor and create some quicker buckets in transition. I thought once we got flowing, that is the speed we need to play at and that’s the speed that we’ve played at all season long when we can truly make an impact. The first quarters are quarters in which we do get held to a quick start and it took us awhile to get going because of the defense they started the game out with.”
On getting your team motivated after Kentucky was up to start the game …
“We knew Kentucky was going to come out with a lot of energy. We just tried to sustain and make sure we were doing what we needed to do to handle their burst of energy that they had to start the game. It took us a couple minutes to really adjust and when we started moving the ball, pushing the ball up the floor, getting the ball inside and in the paint, it opened up for us. I think for the most part, Kentucky controlled the tempo the whole game from tip to buzzer.”
On the 300 wins at South Carolina milestone …
“All the former players who have dedicated their college careers to us here in South Carolina, they’re are big a part of why that happens and our staff as well. I don’t really look at the number of wins, but I do like how we’re regular season champions in a tough conference, if not the best conference. When you’re the number one in this conference, it’s saying something special.”
On how she thought the season would go preseason …
“I didn’t even put goals on this team because I didn’t know them well. A large amount of our team hasn’t played a lot of minutes for us. Nine out of twelve are either a transfer, sophomore or freshman. They really haven’t played a lot of minutes. I knew what Aliyah Boston, Lele Grissett and Mikiah Herbert Harrigan would bring to the table. But that’s just a fourth of our team. The question was how the other three fourths of the team would play in this league and playing the schedule we had. You just don’t know, so you take it day-by-day and you allow them to figure it out. We had the foundation just allowing them the blueprint of what it looks like.”
On carrying over intensity as a player to a coach …
“I think that’s a pretty spot on observation. I’m a point guard, meaning that it’s current because you never lose that title of being a point guard. You’re always directing, you’re always leading, always finding what buttons to push in different players, and I have a whole lot of practice in doing that as a player, so I don’t think much changes when you become a coach because you see it the same way, you’re dealing with people and relationships. Your people want to know that you care about them and once they know you care, you can say whatever you want, uncensored because they know it’s coming from a place of love.”
On SEC tournament loss last year …
“I mean, Kentucky was the one that really upended our chances of becoming tied for the SEC Championship. That one hurt and it hurt because, quite honestly, I didn’t know that team could be where it was at the time and I didn’t think we could get ourselves to a point where we were even in the conversation. That’s why it stunk so much because we worked hard to get to that point and take that kind of defeat at our house, it was really upsetting.”
On Aliyah Boston improving foul trouble …
“The adjustment was to take her out and put V (Victaria Saxton) in. I mean, we have players who sit on our bench and probably won’t play a whole lot of minutes and Aliyah is such an intricate part of what we do on both sides of the ball. It’s not that anyone is incapable, I mean we put Laeticia (Amihere) in at the last four minutes and she came in and gave us some great looks. So, we don’t shy away from giving our bench the opportunity to perform. It’s true that Aliyah takes it hard when she doesn’t play her normal minutes and normal rotation, but I had to tell her you know you have carried us for a lot of games this year, so trust your teammates. Let them do what you’ve been doing for them all season long and then, we got control of the game and we finished it.”
#52 Tyasha Harris, Sr., G.
On getting the regular-season SEC title after two years in second place …
“It feels amazing just because I was part of that history when I first came in here and I was part of the team that lost it, so it was good to just bring it back home.”
On Dawn Staley being hesitant to dole out praise to the team …
“Yeah, she always praises us, but she always likes to say, ‘Don’t sip the Kool-Aid,’ and we don’t want to do that either because we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. She always praises us and always motivates us.”
On this game compared to the first game against Kentucky earlier in the season …
“We knew it was going to be different. It’s kind of hard to play a team twice. We know our tendencies and that kind of thing. Obviously, we played them at home and they got the crowd ad home-court advantage and stuff like that. They just wanted to come back and I know they didn’t want to have the same outcome as the first game, so it was going to be tough” …
#1 Zia Cooke, Fr., G.
On when Kentucky started to close the gap and had to respond in the last three minutes…
“I didn’t even notice that, I was just trying to go out there and make sure I was just moving and flowing, getting my teammates the ball and if I had the opportunity to do so I would do that as well. That’s basically what I do. I just try to go out there and do everything in flow.”
On getting the ball inside against Kentucky from the start …
“That was part of our game plan. Just pound it in the paint. We recognized it from the first game that we contributed to that a lot in plays off of the paint, so we wanted to just stick to the same game plan.”
On the 15-0 run in the first and how it affected the rest of the game …
“Game full of runs so we knew we had run in it, they had a run in them and it’s just being patient and being composed throughout the whole thing.”