AMERICAN CONFERENCE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP

March 14, 2026

Lindsay Edmonds

Hailey Adams

Legacy Arena At The BJCC

Rice Owls

Postgame Press Conference

UTSA 64, Rice 40

THE MODERATOR: We are joined on the podium by Rice head coach Lindsay Edmonds and Hailey Adams. Coach, let's start with some comments from you.

LINDSAY EDMONDS: First of all I want to congratulate Karen and UTSA. They've had an incredible tournament. They deserved to win the championship.

And so they played really, really hard not only today but over the course of this entire tournament. We would like to congratulate them.

Obviously disappointed in the outcome. Again, I mentioned yesterday we weren't here just to compete in a championship. We wanted to win another championship.

And so obviously disappointed in the outcome, but hats off to UTSA.

Q. Can you talk a little bit about the difference from last night to tonight with last night feeling more like an offensive game and tonight definitely low scoring and defensive. Do you think that was the difference or was it attributed to something else?

LINDSAY EDMONDS: Both teams we played were great defensive teams. So does UNT. I feel like yesterday we took better shots. We made more shots. I'm not sure that it was a difference in that sense, but, again, hats off to UTSA. They protected the paint really well. We took a bunch of outside shots. They didn't fall.

We never really kind of overcame that.

Q. Playing until the final whistle. Physical until the last second. Can you talk about the Rice brand of basketball even though that didn't go your way?

LINDSAY EDMONDS: Yeah, I heard our captains, I heard our leaders in the huddle saying, don't quit, don't stop, it's not over. That's what I expect out of my team. We have high standards. We have high expectations and I felt like our captains did a good job of trying to protect that standard even though the outcome wasn't what we wanted it to be.

We never want to be a team that just quit. Didn't quit fighting. I'm proud of that but we have more we could have done during this game.

Q. Hailey, having back to back double-doubles, not the outcome again tonight like I mentioned to coach still fighting until the end.

HAILEY ADAMS: Yeah, I'm proud of our fight as well. At the end of the day, stats don't matter if you don't win games. So I'm happy I got it, I guess, but not the outcome.

Q. Coach, when you look at the American as a whole as a conference, what can it do to continue to get more and more teams into post-season play?

LINDSAY EDMONDS: I mean, it's with our nets, it's with our nonconference scheduling. It's who we're playing in nonconference. It's the equal wins we're getting in nonconference.

Again, we've not lost many games this season, so obviously we wanted to win today so that we could determine our fate, but I do believe that we're a team that deserves to be in the NCAA Tournament with our overall body of work that we have done this season, and so I'm hoping that the committee will look at that and hopefully we can be a two-bid league this year.

Q. Lindsay, if the NCAA berth doesn't happen, how would y'all approach the possibility of playing in the WBIT or another post-season tournament?

LINDSAY EDMONDS: We would definitely play in the WBIT. We would hope to potentially host in that, but we would definitely play in the WBIT.

Q. Can you talk about what you saw change in the second half? You made some runs but couldn't get over that last hump.

LINDSAY EDMONDS: Yeah, ultimately it came down we made a couple of shots but we would not get the stops that we needed. And then the shots would stop falling again so I felt like we just couldn't consistently put it together. We didn't execute the way we would like to probably on either side of the basketball well enough to win the game.