University of North Carolina Athletics
Postgame Quotes
May 15, 2009 | Softball
May 15, 2009
North Carolina Coach Donna J. Papa
"This is where we wanted to be. We wanted to get into the championship game for the regional to be able to put ourselves in a position to advance to the super regional. That's been one of our goals all year, so we're where we want to be. I think tonight our girls fought really hard. Dani Spaulding went in and I thought she did a great job the first few innings, then we felt like we needed to make a change and Lisa (Norris) came in and was lights out. She took care of every single batter, she was on, she was moving her balls, she was hitting her spots. And then she came up huge with that home run. She's been hitting like that in practice all year and hasn't done it as much in games. She did a great job.
"We got 11 hits, nine runs. You've got to hit the ball to score runs and we didn't do that in the game before (against Georgia earlier on Friday), so I was really pleased with how we came out in this game and attacked the ball, played good defense, had great pitching and we just fought the whole game. Radford is a good team, a good hitting team. They answered back a lot of times. It was a battle back and forth. You lose and you're done, your season's done, and we didn't want to be done."
Radford coach Mickey Dean:
"I thought both teams played hard. They out-hit us. That's what it came down to. We had some big hits - we didn't have many hits, but our hits were big hits.
"It was a big momentum changer when the kid (UNC's Emily Troup) hit the home run and didn't touch home plate. And we took advantage of that, but then it was like we flattened out. I don't know if we ran out of gas ... I don't want to use any excuses because you still have to play, but it's kind of like we flat-lined and they took advantage."
On his team's season:
"I'm proud of them. Couldn't be prouder. First Big South Conference championship, first regional win of any team in the schools' history, a lot of firsts. Our first first-team all-region players, and we had four (Chelsea Kelley, Sarah Himan, Nichole Beall and Leigh Godfrey). A lot of firsts. When I came in three years ago, we said there were going to be a lot of firsts, but we had to be the first because it had never been done before. So I couldn't be prouder of them."
