Here is the transcript of today’s press conference for the UConn Huskies women’s basketball team in anticipation of their rematch with the Stanford Cardinal in the Final Four tomorrow in St. Louis.
CONNECTICUT QUOTES
THE MODERATOR: Pleased to be joined up here at the podium by Connecticut head coach Gene Auriemma and Maya Moore and Renee Montgomery.
Again, once we have an opening statement from Coach we’ll take questions for the student-athletes.
COACH AURIEMMA: The same thing I say all the time, whether it’s at the regionals or at the Final Four, game time never gets here fast enough. There’s a million things you have to do and I obviously know they have to be done. But I know I speak for the players. I wish game day was today, but it’s not. We’re anxious to play. We’re obviously thrilled to be here.
I don’t think that we’re surprised that we’re here. This was something that these kids have worked really hard for. And as I tell them every day in practice, there’s only four teams left. And they’re all really, really good. So I would expect nothing but great games on Sunday.
THE MODERATOR: Questions for the student-athletes.
Q. For either or both of you, can you talk about the matchup with Stanford, where you feel like your biggest strengths are and maybe where their strengths lie?
RENEE MONTGOMERY: For Stanford, I think their biggest strength, of course, is their post game. I think Jayne Appel has really made herself a dominant post presence throughout the season, and she’s just left it up to other teams to have to try to stop her. And I also think they have a perimeter to go along with that post game. But I’ll say that’s definitely one of their strengths.
As far as us, our strength is running the floor, making it a full-court game instead of a half-court offense and defense. I think our strength will just be to push the ball as much as possible.
MAYA MOORE: I agree, just as far as our strength being — we like to go. We like to run. And that’s just definitely one of our — mostly our style of play. They’re a disciplined team. They’re going to force us to play their style of basketball. They’re patient with their offense and they get the shot that they want. So we’re just going to have to do our best to try to just disrupt their offensive flow as much as possible.
Q. Maya and then Renee, anything that you learned from last year’s matchup in the semifinal that could help you Sunday?
MAYA MOORE: Just how much those little things matter. And the Final Four, all the things that you work on throughout the year. When your coaches are harping on getting the little things right. I think this year we definitely took it to heart a little more.
And so hopefully we’ve taken care of a lot of those little things and we’ll be able to execute tomorrow.
RENEE MONTGOMERY: I think we learned that it really is a team concept that everybody has to work at the same level and you can’t let someone work at their own pace or, you know — I think that we learned that everyone is accountable 1 through 13 on our team.
And that’s something that we didn’t have last year that we definitely have this year, that no matter how many minutes you play, everyone on the team feels they have a role on the team that they have to do every day for us to be successful.
And I think that’s the main thing, that everybody comes every day ready to do their role and do the best they can.
Q. Both Maya and Renee, what did last year’s game as far as losing, did that in any way teach you how to be ready not to lose tomorrow night?
MAYA MOORE: I don’t think we ever play not to lose. I think we always play to win the game. But I think losing last year did teach us a lot of things about better ways to win, a better way to execute the game or what we did wrong.
I think we came and we didn’t play our style of play. We let them play how they wanted to play and we didn’t play how we wanted to play. So I think it just taught us how to win more, per se, than to not play how to lose.
RENEE MONTGOMERY: I agree. I don’t think you can win championships being afraid that you’re going to lose. And maybe last year, I don’t know, our team maybe was playing with that a little bit. I don’t think we came into that game as confident as we would have liked to have been. And this year we’re not going to play tentative. I think this is win or go home, so we’re going to leave it all out on the court this year.
But we definitely know through Coach and his experience just telling us that you can’t be on the court being afraid to lose. You have to go out there and just being excited and competitive to win.
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Kevin Youkilis added 2 hits and a walk to go with 3 RBIs while Rocco Baldelli had 2 hits from the leadoff spot for the Red Sox today. Jason Varitek also added his 5th home run of the spring, all of them coming from the left side of the plate.
