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NCAA WOMEN'S REGIONAL SEMIFINALS AND FINALS: ALBANYMarch 23, 2018Felisha Legette-JackAlbany, New York THE MODERATOR: Coach, congratulations on advancing. If you, please, provide some opening remarks and then we'll open it up to questions. FELISHA LEGETTE-JACK: Absolutely. As God as head of my life, I'm grateful to be here today and be with a great group of young women to tell our story. I just want to give a shout out to our commissioner of the MAAC, thanking him for all he's done for our conference and letting him know that we're with him in his time of sadness. Q. We all know what A'ja Wilson is capable of and how good of a player she is. What is the game plan for trying to stop her from having a huge game? FELISHA LEGETTE-JACK: Tickle her (laughing). Everyone's tried everything else, and she still averages a high double-double. So our plan is someone go low, someone go high, but nevertheless, we're into the tickle motion. You can't stop someone as good as A'ja. Let's be honest. I'm on a committee, and I voted for her to be Player of the Year. It's a wonderful thing. It's a team sport. It's going to take all five of them for 40 minutes. But she's a special player. No disrespect to what she's capable of doing. We are not going to stop her. We are comfortable understanding that, as we were comfortable understanding that we were not going to stop the young lady at Florida State. But if we can all show up and do our small part, we can have a chance to have success in the game for 40 minutes. South Carolina is a special team. We have to play them ten times. I've got to lean on the fact that they can probably get us by nine of them. At 11:30, we're going to find out how much we can do against one of the best teams in the country. Q. All you have to do is beat the defending champions and then perhaps UConn. How do you convince your players that this moment is not too big for them? FELISHA LEGETTE-JACK: You know, before South Carolina became a national champion, there's a young lady that was head coach at Temple who hoped that she could become something significant as well. She took over a team that wasn't already established, and she built something from nothing to something. In order for us to find our way, we have to take steps. It's a big step, for sure. One thing that we're not going to do is put our focus on South Carolina. We've not put our focus on any team that we've ever played. We're going to put our focus on the foxhole that we're in, the 14 young ladies that believe in our vision. We're going to fight really hard to make Buffalo proud, make our university proud, make our families proud. Most importantly to leave it out there so when we look in the mirror we can make ourselves proud. Q. You just mentioned having the opportunity to tell your story. How would you sum up your story? FELISHA LEGETTE-JACK: You know, fight. I come from a mother who raised five children, retired, making 36,000, she shared with us that we have no choice but to be significant in this world. She did everything with a smile. She tithes every single week, and for some reason she found money to tithe and always have enough money for our family. So if she can do it and become, we have no choice, because at least we have four other people, my brothers and my sisters. So nothing is too great for us because we saw a lady become, and she raised five great children. So as big as the mountain may seem, all we do is ask God for the strength to continue to take the step. We've got the strength to take the step, we can keep climbing. So that's what we do. We do it every day. We do it through success. We had great success. My college coach is in the back right there and she pushed us to a strong foundation. We do it through failure. Last job I failed. You just keep moving. If you give us strength to take the step, I'm going to keep trying to climb. Q. Earlier today Dawn was talking about how mid-majors have been recruiting better and recruiting more creatively. She talked about you recruiting international players. Can you sort of talk about that strategy and how that may be necessary when you're trying to recruit against these Power Five schools? FELISHA LEGETTE-JACK: You know, I never looked at myself as a mid-major coach or mid-major team. I looked at myself as a coach going after people that want to tell their story. I thought about that when I was an assistant coach at Boston College and Syracuse and Michigan State. When I was the head coach at Hofstra and Indiana, I never told them that we're in the mecca of a conference or team at Indiana, nor did I tell them that Hofstra was not as big as a St. John's in the state of New York. We just promoted what we had. We were in New York. We were in the mecca of the world. At Buffalo I thought we were a hidden jewel, a program that had no success in women's basketball, and we could be the first to make it happen. Are you interested? Will you try to come and help? And the young ladies that said yes were clearly young ladies that didn't have a lot of people saying we want you too. So together we became. We fought. We have a system we call CAB. I didn't want to bring players into our program without understanding their character, their academics, and their academics will precede their basketball. And we thought we could coach people that had character and academics, even if they didn't have strength in basketball. We thought we had a great coaching staff in Cherie Hogg and K.C. Carter and Kristen Sharkey and Karin Moss that we can develop. Those young ladies said yes. They stayed in the fight. They kept fighting with us, and here we are. Q. Did you tell international players where Buffalo was and what it was about? FELISHA LEGETTE-JACK: Well, I told the truth. I have a coach that isn't always so truthful. Her name is Cherie Hogg Cordoba. She was telling the Australians that it didn't snow. They had two choices. They could have looked and saw that there was snow everywhere. No, she didn't say it didn't snow. She said it didn't snow a lot. Which Stephanie and Courtney came for an entire winter. They never knew we had lakes and little ponds behind the dormitories. Then I think around June when the snow melted, they were like we didn't even know it was winter out here. I tell you, I'm good, but you've got somebody that's on the fence about truth on my staff, and I'm not going to say her name out loud (laughing). Q. I know you and Dawn go way back. Do you have any good, funny stories or whatever from back in the day? FELISHA LEGETTE-JACK: I don't. But it's an honor to see you, sir, you've done so much for women's basketball. But to me Dawn has always been really serious. I don't know her personally, per se. I just know she's a fighter. I know I watched her as a player when she was at Virginia. Consistently get to the Final Four. I know that she's a ferocious competitor and winner. When you're that way all the time, I might have never saw her laughing. I just saw her compete and trying to win. Q. With the big moment, I know we talk about your stories being fight, but you've also talked about being goofy and really enjoying and having fun. How do you balance? How do you balance that this is a big moment, but you also want to have fun and bring the little bit of swagger you guys have? FELISHA LEGETTE-JACK: I think our kids call it quirky. They're so smart. They come up with these words that's like sophisticated, but it's just silly and we're quirky. We laugh hard, we laugh a lot. But they absolutely understand once we cross that blue line on our court, we pay attention totally to what their dreams are. They want to win. They want to tell their story. They want to become WNBA players. They want to play overseas. They say I have two personalities. I'm mom, fun, and loving, but something happens to me and us when we cross that line and we recognize that we're in the battlefield for something bigger than basketball. It's our story to be told. So it's just kind of something that happens. Sometimes it doesn't happen, and we just right away get on the line, let's go, let's run. Sometimes we go through drills and they're not going hard enough, I just jump out there and show them this is how hard we're going to go. And at 51, in my mind I'm still thinking that I'm that college player that played for Coach Jacobs, you know, and making some Hall of Fame stuff. My body is telling me no. I'm up there trying -- this is how you make the lay-up. And it won't go in. But they get the point that I'm trying. If it's going to have to be, it's going to be me. If it's not going to be you, you want me to come out there and do it? Because I will. So they get that piece. It's kind of weird because they thought I was coming after the person and just come after the player relentlessly. I've just been that way all my life. I brought in 14 players that understand this quirkiness. Q. Coach, what has the reception been back in Buffalo from the city and the school? And are you expecting tomorrow to pretty much be a home game for you guys? FELISHA LEGETTE-JACK: I don't want this to be taken any other way, but this is just who I am. Everywhere I go I think we're in a home game. We're in Florida, we're in Arizona, you have to think you belong there. If you don't, you are going to be a visitor. If you're a visitor, you can be asked to leave at any time. So we go there with that understanding. It was really nice to see the governor tweet out that he's proud of what we're doing. It was really nice to see our mayor get excited. It's really amazing to see the Buffalonians. I mean, we know how crazy our Buffalonians can be when they go after those Buffalo Bills and those Sabres. Have that same group of blue-collar people really be proud of what we're doing. It's just so humbling, so exciting, and we want to leave it out there for them to really continue that pride. Q. After you win two games in the tournament as an 11 seed, does the confidence start building, or is it like when is this going to end kind of deal? What is going through your team's minds as they prepare for the Sweet Sixteen? Most people probably didn't think you'd be here. FELISHA LEGETTE-JACK: Well, we always thought we were going to be here, we just never got here ever since I started coaching 28 years ago. That's the expectation. That's the mindset. So many coaches that really have the same kind of mindset, we were blessed to take this another step. But I'm not smart enough to know about 11, and 2, and 3, and 5, those numbers. That doesn't mean anything when the ball goes in the air. If that's the case, somebody forgot to tell Loyola, and somebody forgot to tell Jim Boeheim. So we say, you know, in 40 minutes anything can happen. We want something magical to happen. We've been creating magic since June. Our oneness, our sisterhood, our fight, our stubbornness to quit. The coach pushed so hard, and if you get on the barrel and let it all out of your body. I say you, go see the trainer? No, Coach, I need to finish this champion, we've got 12 more to go. In order to be a champion, you've got to do 15 of them. I'm at 12, and I cannot stop. I have to do it all over again the next day. So the fight has been predicated since June. To think that it's a weirdness that we're winning, we've been winning in preseason. We've been winning in the summer. The expectation is to win all the time. If you don't score more points than the next team, I'm hoping that the win could be something that you look in the mirror and say, you know what? I left it out there. There was nothing else left. Therefore, we continue to win. Q. My question is following up on that. When you're hearing people calling you guys a Cinderella team, you're not a Cinderella team because you're not winning at the buzzer. The way you've handled yourself. Does it irk you when you hear you're being called that? But you're not. You've proven you're one of the top teams in the country. How does that make you feel? FELISHA LEGETTE-JACK: It makes me feel like they saw me dance before. They know I can dance, and I think that's a compliment, you know? I'm teasing. I don't let anybody's expectations of who we are become our significance. It never has before. I've never looked at other people's success and said, oh, man, I'm so jealous. Nor did I say there's never going to be a time that we're not going to become, because the work ethic never changed. So we don't care. No disrespect to somebody that thinks this is a fluke. We don't really get excited where they say, yeah, we should have done this. We just stay locked into our sisterhood and our family. I have 14 great kids that I'm just trying to extend it as long as I can. To have this opportunity here late in March, to be with these young ladies and to sit in that restaurant last night. They can go anywhere they want to have dinner. These young ladies want to go to Red Lobster, a chain restaurant. And they sat in that restaurant and they laughed so hard that Cierra and Stephanie are reduced to tears. Everybody just started laughing. Nobody knows what they're laughing at to this day. I said, Coach, take a picture of this. These are the moments that mean more to me than a ball ever going in the hole. They're never going to remember how far they went. I don't know how far we went at Syracuse, but I do know 30 years later we still get together with our coach in the summer and go on vacation and tell stories that I know, for a fact, never happened. But we tell them so much it's now like they did. That's what I pray for this team, is that they create these stories and these fun times. Things that are more important than the ball going in the hole to remember for the rest of their lives. Q. I know you talked a lot this week about the MAAC and you guys at Central Michigan. Is it sort of the hidden gem that no one outside of women's basketball knew what the MAAC was, and here we are having two teams still playing and they're doing well? They're not just winning at the buzzer, but they're winning handily on the road? FELISHA LEGETTE-JACK: We lost to Central Michigan in the championship game, and some people thought that we blew it. I'm like, you need to guard Presley for 40 minutes, the kid that can hit half-court shots. And they have Frost who can rebound with anybody in the country. She can jump about five inches off the ground. She's six feet at best. Her timing is the best I've ever seen, and that is the strength I really love to my heart. I'm like I just hope that people can see what we went through. I think that Sue would say the same thing about a few of my players and the things that we've done. To have this opportunity where the world can see us and what we really are about in the MAAC Conference, including Toledos, the Ball States, Ohio a couple years ago who got left out who were 26 and something and didn't get an at-large bid four years ago. I am so grateful that he chose us to tell the story. Because we're not really just fighting for Buffalo and saying look how great Buffalo is. And she's not just talking about Central Michigan. It's an entire MAAC Conference. We have a guy named Ricky Stokes who is our commissioner for women's and men's basketball who played at Virginia, a big-time player. For him to be in the MAAC for so many years, he saw something a lot earlier than we did. I think now I pray that everyone would just take teams and just say this team's RPI, this body of work, this boom, boom, boom, they belong because that team without a name on it, oh, it's Buffalo. Oh, it's Central Michigan. Oh, it's the MAAC. We're not there yet, for sure, because I know names got to be in so women can get the respect and the fan base and all that stuff. But in this crazy dream of mine, I still dream that you can just by the creative work, not the complexion of the name or the conference. We're on our way. We're just not there yet. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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