Jan. 4, 2007
USC Head Coach Susan Walvius
“If you look at this game on the stat sheet again, and you’ll see a couple of times this year, we win this game on the floor and lose it on the free throw line. We outrebound them 41-31 and had only one more turnover in the game. Statistically we win this game, but we fouled them too much and lost a lot of easy shots. We understand what the issue is and are doing things to work on their confidence. It’s just making easy baskets. We got the shots we wanted on the offense and got easy shots in this game. We fixed things at halftime. We attacked outside and finally hit outside shots. Unfortunately we didn’t pull away the win.”
“I thought at halftime with two teams averaging in the mid-70’s as far as scoring that we held them to what I thought we’d hold them to, especially at home in this facility. At the break they only had 33 points which was encouraging. I was really surprised we had only 21 points at the half, especially as strong offensively as we have been. I thought their big players stepped up and hit some shots for them. (Kentucky center) Sarah Elliot is a great player for them. We are two of most experienced team in country, we’ve battled a lot over the years and this is a very tough place to get a win.”
On Lakesha Tolliver:
“She did a nice job. She followed our gameplan. We didn’t want a finesse game. We knew they lacked depth in the post and we wanted to attack in the post. One thing is that I don’t think Iva Sliskovic was feeling well tonight and that showed. Losing that depth a little hurt us. But Ilona Burgrova played strong and Lakesha played strong for us.”
“We didn’t beat Kentucky last year, but we’ll have another opportunity to play them at home. We played better here than we did last year. We need to be encouraged by that. The focus here is that we need to win eight SEC games. You don’t need to win them all, but you need to steal a few on the road. I’m excited about the opportunity at Stanford. We just need to fight and grow and get better. But we’re a better team right now than we were last year at this time.”
