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MOUNTAIN WEST CONFERENCE WOMEN'S TOURNAMENTMarch 10, 2012Beth BurnsCourtney ClementsChelsea HopkinsKalena TuttLAS VEGAS, NEVADA San Diego State – 57 THE MODERATOR: We're ready to start with SanDiego State. Coach, if we start with you, your remarks on today's game. COACH BURNS: Well, first would like to congratulate New Mexico on just a fantastic run. I can't credit their coaching staff and their athletes enough. They have a lot of older athletes on their team, juniors and seniors, who this was it. It's kind of tough to have a struggle of a season. We've all been there. But to rally and come here. I tip my cap to the people of New Mexico who really, really support their team and give them a lot of juice. I've seen every minute of the two games prior to this one and they were really impressive. Just would like to congratulate them on the run that they made. As for us, couldn't be more excited. I think we may have skipped a step, if you will. I knew we had a talented young group. But the key was young, and our inside game beyond Kalena Tutt was such a question mark. We just weren't really sure how fast everything would get put together. I think it's a tribute to the older players on our team, the commitment they made, and the younger players on our team listening to the older players because they did I guess what you're supposed to do, which is get better and better and better as the season went on. Now we have the grandest prize one can get in March, which is an opportunity to go play in the 64 next week. THE MODERATOR: We'll now take questions for our student‑athletes. Q. I imagine it must have been frustrating when nothing seemed to fall in the first half. COURTNEY CLEMENTS: Yeah, it was. But I think we came out so strong, all the adrenaline went away, we weren't as focused as we usually are. It was a little bit frustrating. We knew we were going to bounce back. Halftime we kind of refocused and we came out strong in the second half. KALENA TUTT: I know with the first half how some of our shots weren't falling, we can always depend on our defense. That's one thing we can control, is to stop another team from scoring. CHELSEA HOPKINS: Yeah, copy that (smiling). Q. Getting off to a good start is always the game plan going in. When you got to that point, how crucial was it in a game like this? CHELSEA HOPKINS: I think the start we had was really critical in how the game played out. We came out really confident, really strong. Like they said, we kind of took our foot off the gas a little bit. For the most part since we were in the lead, if the game were to end, we were to win. I felt like we had a little bit of a cushion and that led to us refocusing in the second half and coming out even stronger. But for the most part we had the lead. I felt like we had control most of the game. They made a great run and they did rally, but at the same time we were able to answer it and maintain the lead and get the win. Q. Chelsea, you had a strong tournament. What do you attribute to the strong three games you had? CHELSEA HOPKINS: Honestly, I attribute everything to my teammates. Everybody likes to talk about my assist‑to‑turnover ratio. I'm doing whatever it takes to make this team win. I pass the ball, Courtney makes the shots, KT makes the shots. I know having my teammates back me, counting on me to lead, help this team rally, is really what was my motivation for the tournament and the success that we had. Q. There was a time this year when you struggled a bit. What does it feel like now to know you're going to the tournament? CHELSEA HOPKINS: It feels amazing. From day one we set goals for ourselves. We knew we wanted to win 20 games, win the conference tournament outright and obviously get a NCAA bid. We feel confident and blessed to be in the position we are in. We don't want to stop here. This is the start of a new season. We'll celebrate this victory but then we'll lock in and refocus to see where we end up Monday. Q. Courtney, when you got going in October, could you see this coming? COURTNEY CLEMENTS: Oh, yeah. Right away I could tell that our freshmen were very talented. Even though they're young and inexperienced, they have so much energy. They bring that energy every single day. It just spreads to us. Sometimes being older you get bored. You've been doing the same thing for three years, four years. Our freshmen do a good job of coming in every day energetic, ready to learn. I knew we were talented and it was going to be a special team. Q. Chelsea, could you talk about how special it was to win it here in Las Vegas where you grew up. CHELSEA HOPKINS: It's the best feeling in the world. Like I said previously, when I made the decision to come to SanDiego State, I just wanted to be involved with my family and friends. I wanted them to have the opportunity to see me play and to see me do what I love. So just to be out here, I just feel really blessed and fortunate that all my family came out. The crowd support we had for the entire team was amazing. We had a lot of people that had been supportive all season, that made the trip all the way from SanDiego to come down to be with us. Really excited, really grateful and happy we performed and got the W. THE MODERATOR: We'll dismiss the student‑athletes at this time and continue with questions for Coach Burns. Q. ESPN Bracketology has you as a 14 seed. Do you think that's right or you deserve better? COACH BURNS: The key phrase is they have us as 'a seed'. You see SanDiego State. That's the first step. Early on, I thought for us to do what we did this year would be skipping a step, but I also knew it was a transitional year in the conference. We had some people leaving, we had some people coming in. Most importantly we all had a ton of seniors a year ago. So it was more kind of a, Why not us? We're all going to do bonehead things, we all can maybe do some good things. We knew the kind of recruiting class we had brought in to be able to do that. With that said, I think because we all had really young, inexperienced teams, it's like two different seasons. When you look at the non‑conference records of all our Mountain West teams, if they played those people now. Because everybody was playing with people in different roles. Other than Vegas, everybody was a brand‑new group of players. I think that's why their non‑conference record, we're way out here in the west, once you mess up early, it's hard to get it back. I felt ourselves with our DePaul win, and Vegas with a couple out‑of‑conference wins gave us some credibility. But if night after night you're playing somebody that potentially is a low RPI, that's going to affect you. We'll have most everybody back. We'll beef up next year. We're too young this year to do that. We'll do the best we can to balance that going forward. Am I disappointed in that? Not at all. There's a lot of really good teams out there. Q. Obviously your bench played a pretty big role in this tournament. Talk about the progression of that group. COACH BURNS: Well, I think that's the whole difference. Well, two differences. One is we have the best point guard in the conference, one of the best point guards eventually I think anywhere around. The second part of that is I'm not afraid. You'll see, our stats are misleading. It depends on what we're playing. If we're playing a game like tonight, Ahjalee Harvey is going to play 20 minutes. Or play a game like big, strong Wyoming yesterday, then Melissa Sweat is going to get 20 minutes or Amarikwa. That's what has been so good about this team. They don't have green‑eyed monsters. Everybody knows the sum of our parts help us to win. To me, that's why we won the league, because we could have a bad night, somebody getting sick, on and on, somebody always picked somebody up. Q. Can you talk about the dominance on the rebounding category, especially the offensive rebounds. COACH BURNS: For us, this isn't very good. We've kind of tailed the last two or three games. Not necessarily our starting group, but our young guys off the bench can really get to the rim. Ofttimes their own shots are what they're going to get off the rim, but they do go up. I don't know if I ever had a game where somebody didn't have an offensive rebound at halftime. Yesterday they had a couple offensive rebounds at the half. We run if we control the defensive glass. As you saw in our halfcourt, we like to run. That was kind of a point of emphasis coming in. Really proud how we kept them off the glass and enabled us to get out and get such a great start. I thought that was a huge key to the first half. THE MODERATOR: Thank you very much, coach. COACH BURNS: Final comments. The Aztecs are here to get two championships. Just wanted to put that on record to get two. Don't leave, fellas. Get back out there. Got more work to do. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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