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NCAA WOMEN'S REGIONALS: AUSTIN

December 8, 2016

Austin, Texas

THE MODERATOR: Good afternoon, everybody. We are joined by Michigan now. We have Coach Mark Rosen, senior Kelly Murphy, senior Ally Davis, and senior Abby Cole. Coach, an open statement on your thoughts on this weekend's regional?

COACH ROSEN: First of all, we're happy to be here, happy to still be playing. Happy to be here, but not satisfied to be here. So I'm excited about the weekend and great tournament as far as the teams that are here. Everyone's earned their way here, so it's always fun when you're playing in that kind of atmosphere.

Creighton, our first opponent, if we're lucky enough to have a second one, is a really good team. We're excited about playing them as we started to scout and watch them, they do some really good things, and it should be a really good match. So excited about that.

One thing I want to hit on is these guys, having our three seniors here, two fifth-years and a fourth-year senior, these guys have done a great job all year long. Our leadership has been outstanding and that's why we're here right now.

Q. This is your first Sweet Sixteen since 2012, that was the same year you advanced to the Final Four. Does that give this team any incentive in this tournament?
KELLY MURPHY: I think we definitely want to make it to the National Championship this year and we didn't do that in 2012, so we're looking at just advancing further than we did back then.

ALLY DAVIS: Yeah, this is the farthest a lot of the girls have gone, a lot of the girls on the team. So just making it as far as we can, and like Kelly said, getting to the National Championship is the goal.

Q. The weather is supposed to be unseasonably cold in Austin at the moment, so do you think that's helped you guys settle in a little bit? And it's supposed to be 70 on Sunday. Coming from Ann Arbor, I think it's supposed to be 25 or less?
ALLY DAVIS: It's snowing there right now.

COACH ROSEN: The cold weather is advantage Michigan.

KELLY MURPHY: We purposely all left our winter puffer jackets at home.

Q. Can you go down the row with your seniors and what they bring to the table?
COACH ROSEN: I think one of the great things is when you talk about leadership as a coach, and we spent a lot of time thinking about leadership, it's amazing how that works. One of the things I like about this group, and we knew this early on when they were emerging as the leaders for this group was how different they are in their styles and how different they are in what they bring to the table.

Kelly's a fifth-year senior. She was on that team in 2012 that went to the national semifinals, so she's got a lot of experience that way. She's kind of, I think you use the word the enforcer on the team a little bit. But she's someone who is very serious, and does a good job taking care of a lot of the details.

I actually had these guys write up a job description of what they bring and what each person is going to fill. And Kelly is fun. She's not a non-fun person, but she's very competitive and doesn't mind saying what she thinks needs to happen for us to be successful on a given day. So I think she brings a really strong leadership in that area.

I think Ally is another fifth-year senior -- they're all worried about what I'm going to say now. Isn't that funny?

Ally was a fifth-year senior who was on that team in 2012. And Ally's one of the people that I found in our program that relates unbelievably well with anybody she's dealing with it. Whether it's a young freshman, whether it's a classmate, whether it's a peer, whether it's somebody that's outside of our program, she relates incredibly well to people. So as a relater in our captain's trio here, I think she's the one that does a good job of that. And I think our freshmen benefited greatly from her because she's so good at taking them under her wing and helping with that process because of her relatability. And she can relate on so many different levels as a key player, as a starter, somebody who is not starting.

If you watch the energy on our bench, we get warned all the time by referees and usually it's her that's leading that charge, and I'm so proud of that. I tell her, don't worry about getting warned all we want. I just want you guys enthusiastic, and she brings a ton of energy and relates really well.

I think Abby is a really unique captain. As I said, she leads by example, she works hard every day. She's very physical. She makes a big impact. The thing that makes it such a good leadership role for her is she's incredibly humble. She never makes it about herself. She never makes it, even though a lot of other people make it about her, she's always deflecting that and always taking a very humble road, which I think is a great quality as a leader and you're an impactful player. All of them have meant so much to our program, and I kind of get reflective and sad when I think about no matter what there are only four more matches left, at the most. That stinks because I love having these guys in our program, and I'm certainly going to miss them when they're not.

Q. How do you handle the offense with three middles?
COACH ROSEN: We actually did early in the year, and then we went away from it for a good month and a half, probably. And then just in the last three or four weeks kind of went back to it maybe a little longer than that. It's been evolutionary in that process. Early on we wanted to be more physical, we wanted to be more of a blocking lineup that we could be a little more effective as the blocking team. But offensively I don't think we were -- it wasn't connecting. We weren't getting the offense out of it. So it was putting a lot of pressure on a couple of positions because we were so unbalanced offensively.

So we actually went to more of a traditional system where we had Katherine Mahlke our lefty right side who could score like crazy. She can get a lot of kills and we all of a sudden became more offensive. But we gave up a little bit of the blocking on the defensive side. And then Cori Crocker, the freshman middle, she's the one that really made that change happen, because in practice you could see her developing offensively, and there's about a three-, four-week period of time where offensively she was really hard to stop in practice, but not getting opportunities in games, and our blocking was problematic a little bit.

So we went to that to get more blocking focus, and yet we still got some offense, because she was kind of maturing and growing as a player. So I think Cori's development allowed that to really happen and allowed us to be a lot bigger. I think blocking-wise, we're pretty effective blocking-wise, and that made a big impact.

Q. How do you see MacKenzi Welsh as a freshman setter?
ABBY COLE: I don't think of her as a freshman setter any more. She's very experienced as far as I'm concerned right now, and she's done a great job throughout the season. Worked her butt off to get better every single day and worked the tempo. Has started really understanding like what each hitter needs for their set and now she's just setting great balls.

ALLY DAVIS: And she's really outgoing, so she came in right away and wasn't shy, which us you usually can see from freshmen sometimes. So she hit her stride really soon.

KELLY MURPHY: That's a really big role for our freshmen to come in and fill, and she did a great job with that. She didn't ever seem nervous. Her confidence certainly didn't waiver much. So, I don't know. I think that she's improved a lot throughout the season, and like Kelly said, her experienced isn't really questioned by us.

Q. How do you go from a 6-2 to a 5-1?
COACH ROSEN: Yeah, last year we had to do that a little bit out of necessity. We had a setter that took a career-ending medical, so it kind of forced us into a situation where we had two smaller setters that we didn't feel like could compete as well with one in the front row. So we were in and out of the 5-2 last year a lot.

This year we started with the 6-2, mainly to bring Mac along a little slower. On the other side of it, Maddy Abbott who set for us last year, she really did a great job. She did a great job last year, and a great job all spring, and she did a great job preseason. So we wanted to let that play out instead of us making this decision early on based on what we thought might happen. We wanted to let it happen.

So running the 6-2 helped us and also gives us a chance to develop other hitters and other offensive options. So I think, again, it was very evolutionary where we were going through it and we were realizing, hey, we're a little more consistent in these situations. We also wanted to go with the three-middle system, and that was, again, in probably September. I think it was after the Pitt match. Then that kind of precipitated us going into a 5-1 to be able to run that.

But I think Mac was just ready, but I don't know if she was right off the bat, but we didn't want to really force that issue.

Q. What are the keys for Michigan to play well?
COACH ROSEN: Why don't you guys answer that.

ALLY DAVIS: We're definitely relaxed and having fun. When everyone's enjoying it, these things go much smoother on offense, and we're making a lot more digs and a lot more blocks. That's what I would say.

KELLY MURPHY: I would add aggressive, and fun. We're in rhythm. Our bench gets really into it which is awesome. You can feel the energy one through 19 deep on our team when we're playing well.

ABBY COLE: And when we're having fun and we're playing free, like they were saying, aggressive, our attackers are going after kills. You're not really holding yourself back at all.

COACH ROSEN: One of the things I like about this team is I think they're very authentic. I think this team, they know what their strengths are, they know what their weaknesses are. They don't hide from either one of them. We went through a stretch the last five matches of the season we played our rival in Michigan State that was ranked 11 or 12 the at the time. We played number one, number two, and number three, and we played Michigan State again in that run. So those five games. We went 1-4. And these guys may be shocked to hear that, 1 in 4. At no point did you see our team look concerned or dejected or frustrated or lack confidence. They're very good evaluating what are we doing right now, and are we doing it well or not? Not what the score is or what the outcome is. Those are things we can't control. I think the things that we can control, this team is really good about keeping that as a priority. I just really like that about them. I think it tells me they're authentic. They know who they are, they know what they're about. Kelly is a great example. Kelly's not going to tell you she's going to jump over the top of people and be the most physical kid in the gym, but she's a heck of a volleyball player and she'll find a way to beat you. She plays to restraints ^ , and I think our whole team does that well.

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