University of North Carolina Athletics
Postgame Quotes - Carolina 83, Wake Forest 45
February 20, 2015 | Women's Basketball
Posgtame Press Conference
North Carolina 83, Wake Forest 45 • February 19, 2015
UNC Head Coach Sylvia Hatchell
Opening Statement
“Allisha [Gray] pulled a Michael Jordan, today they diagnosed her with the flu. I told her, I said, 'Look, one of the best games he ever played was when he had the flu.' He played for the Chicago Bulls and he had the flu. At halftime I said, 'You're pulling the Michael Jordan.' She had 16 points, and played well. It was a good win. 21-6, 8-5 in the league, and had some ups and downs, but we were hitting on pretty good cylinders tonight. Fifty percent for the three, nine for 18 was really good. Latifah [Coleman] shot the ball really well today, did a really good job out there, and then we had 21 assists. I really liked that, and then 13 steals. We were switching up defenses, trapping some. We were doing a lot of switching, just a lot different things defensively, and I think that helped us out quite a bit. We put N'Dea [Bryant] on Hamby to start the game, and she played her most of the game and did a nice job on her. Because Hamby will be a first round draft pick. That was really big for us. I thought we did a good job, and it was a good win. Now we got to get ready to go to Miami and play on Sunday. I told them in the locker room, I said, 'I didn't think I'd ever be as happy to go on a road game as I probably will be this weekend.' We fly down on Saturday, and it'll be nice to get somewhere for a couple days where it's warmer weather. We leave Saturday and play at 3 o'clock on Sunday. They're really, really tough on their home court, and they'll be mad because they lost tonight at [NC] State. So they'll be really mad, but they're really, really tough down there. Two years ago we played them down there and about 35 seconds to go we were down by seven and we ended up winning in regulation. It's always a tough place to play.”
N'Dea Bryant, G on holding Dearica Hamby, F down
“Just trying to stay in front of her. Just not letting her body me up. Just moving my feet a lot because she's definitely bigger than me a little bit. Just not letting her get a body on me and just trying to get in front of her at all times. Definitely just not letting her get the ball. It makes it easy for me because if she gets the ball it makes it tough for me to stop her. I just tried to eliminate her getting the ball.”
Bryant on the key, balanced scoring
“I thought we came out confident and ready to play. Everybody just wanted to get the job done and be out.”
Hatchell on what they did to force so many turnovers
“I think that when you throw so many different things out there like we threw traps on screens, we threw some switches. I mean we throw a lot of different things out there, and one time down it may be open and the next time it's not going to be open because of how we're doing some things out there. Our defense has been pretty solid except some of our post defense at times. Like against Elizabeth Williams and stuff like that, but overall, we've had some pretty good defense this year. We just threw a lot of different things at them. Hopefully, we can keep doing that and keep getting better.”
Latifah Coleman, G on getting six assists and five steals
“We've been having some intense practices lately, and we've just been competing well, and that's a lot of the things that I've been doing in practice is taking the ball and be aggressive so I think that just carried over tonight.”
Bryant on steals
“We're a fast-break team so steals are great for us. I feel like we finish well and that's what Carolina Basketball is about. Getting steals and fast-break points. It's normal, really. That's what we're here to do.”
Wake Forest Head Coach Jen Hoover
Opening Statement
“I was really pleased with our focus and our defensive effort first to begin the game. I thought our zone was really effective. Allisha Gray was able to get a couple offensive rebounds, so I thought that really hurt us a little bit. And then offensively, I thought early, too, we were really moving the basketball and cutting hard and getting some good looks, and then the wheels fell off and we started throwing it to the wrong team. It's one of our Achilles' heels right now, and they're a team that has always forced us into a lot of turnovers. And we're just young and we're going through a lot of growing pains with that, and we've just got to stay the course and keep figuring it out and learning from each experience.
On being competitive
“We just felt like we had to limit turnovers and we had to keep them off the offensive glass. We felt like those are the two main ways they score. They're obviously a very explosive offensive team, they've got a lot of weapons, they're so athletic. [Stephanie] Mavunga inside is a problem for anybody and everybody, so we really felt like we had to limit those two things, and we were really going to try to limit them to one shot, and then we really had to get great shots every time down the floor. And so once that started to not happen for us, I think we really started to push a little bit, and then we missed some shots, and it just really kind of went downhill from there.”
On Dearica Hamby, F, having to play her best against a top-20 team
“She puts a lot of pressure on herself for that. This is the first time back-to-back games since we've had her that she really hasn't scored in double figures. I know that for her, we're coming down to the wire here, and you've got the tale of two different seniors there. You've got Millesa Calicott who's really stepped into an opportunity with K.K. [Kelila] Atkinson being out and had to slide into a starting role for us. And she's got back to back games of being our leading scorer for us and is coming in playing with a little bit of confidence. After the last game, I said that's a good thing for us because it gives us one more guard that's confident. When we get K.K. back, we still have Millesa playing with that confidence. You look at Amber Campbell's line, and she was very efficient on the offensive end, and she's got to get more shots in that. So we've got to work to get her more, and she's got to work to get more shots.”
On turnovers
“They're a team that does that anyway. I know they force 20 turnovers a game. They switch a lot of screens. It's stuff we worked on for the last two days. Unfortunately turnovers, they come in bunches. And once they start coming, it's hard to stop them. You saw me call a couple of quick timeouts to try to stop them down a little bit. But, again, it's one of those things that we've got to learn from it, we've got to move on from it, and we've got to continuously talk about why we're making those turnovers, decision-making. With a team like them, the holes close up a lot faster because they are so athletic, so we really talk about using ball fakes and being very decisive with our passes and really stepping to our passes.”
