Courtesy of the Sun Belt Conference
South Alabama Quotes
Opening Statement from Head Coach Rick Pietri: “I thought we played really today. We talked about as a team that we wanted to get to two minutes with a competitive game, and Middle’s only played two single-digit games since Christmas. We wanted to get to two minutes and give ourselves a chance. We gave ourselves a chance and had a couple turnovers on the defensive assignments. We’re not able to steal it from them. Middle Tennessee is a great basketball team, and we knew that we would have to have a great to superior effort to beat them, and I thought our effort was really, really good, it just didn’t quite get to the great or superior we needed. And the free throw line statistically killed us. You make 4-for-13 against a really good team, that’s not a good thing. I just wish we could have, selfishly for us, do the right thing a handful more times and give ourselves a chance to actually beat these guys because that would have been a great feeling to beat them.”
Question for Head Coach Rick Pietri:
Is there a formula for beating Middle Tennessee?
“We watched closely what FAU did. We actually showed that to our team because one of the things, and take this the right way, Middle when they play you, they like to humiliate you if they can. They want to pound you into the ground and step on your neck and keep stepping on your head, and they’re going to humiliate you so that the next time that they play you, you’re scared to death. Our kids got tired of being humiliated because they have humiliated us. We weren’t going to be humiliated today. So we talked about, you cannot be soft against these people. When they punch you in the face and knock you down, you have to get up and punch them right back in the mouth, and we did that. When they attacked us, we attacked them right back. I think psychologically that’s the first thing we had to overcome.”
Question for Ra’Shawna Sippio:
Why is it so hard to defend Clark?
“She’s a good player. You can’t deny that, she’s a really good player. She finishes when she wants to, and she goes hard. It just all came down to playing good defense and playing hard along with her and not just letting her get easy baskets.”
Was it part of the plan to be more physical than you were during the first two meetings?
“That was part of the plan. We wanted to come out stronger and play as hard as we could and try to win. We knew that we could.”
Question for Shakira Nettles:
What were you thinking at halftime?
“We believed we were in the game. Since I’ve been on the team I think this is the best we’ve played Middle. The only thing disappointing is the result.”
Middle Tennessee Quotes
Middle Tennessee Head Coach Rick Insell Quotes:
Opening Statement from Head Coach Rick Insell: “What a great effort by two great teams. I’m telling you, South Alabama did a great job, they played hard all day long. They are well coached. We knew, that coming in, they are very athletic, they knock down threes?they play with a lot of confidence. That group right there has grown up through this season?through this 18-game grind. We knew they were tough even though we had manhandled them the other two times. We knew coming in they were going to give us a battle and that they were going to be tough because they are athletic. They did a good job, Rick [Pietri] is a good coach.”
On fighting through foul trouble:
“We never talk about it. We are aggressive, we foul. That’s part of our practice strategy, we are very aggressive?we know we are going to get in foul trouble. We’ve got some other kids that can play.”
On superb free throw shooting:
“We are going to attack the basket with Clark, [Brandi] Brown and Emily Queen?and we are going in looking for contact and we are hoping it gets called. Sometimes it doesn’t and most of the time it does. Those fouls that Alysha acquired-- you know-- those were fouls they were contact fouls and they had to be called. She stepped to the line and knocked down free throws. You don’t win championships without rebounding, hitting free throws and playing pretty good defense and that’s what we did today.”
On Impact of Tina Stewart:
“That was big, that was big. She’s been in at the end of some games. She does a good job in practice. She goes up against Chelsia [Lymon] everyday and she’s probably as good of a player that I’ve got in terms of taking the ball to the basket. I got on her after the game because I knew she wasn’t going to hit the free throw because she never hits them in practice?but she hit the chip shot and then hit the free throw and that was a big play.”
On South Alabama’s athleticism:
It was much like a Tennessee team. They are pretty good offensively too. They stepped up and hit some big threes when they had to have some shots. They played all their roles like they should have and Rick had them well prepared and they took advantage of some of our weaknesses.
