Missouri Quotes
12/9/2001 12:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
Dec. 9, 2001
Recap?|? Final Stats?|? Notes
Missouri head coach Cindy Stein
On Northern Iowa: "Northern Iowa is an excellent team. They're notorious every year for picking off SMS and Drake in the Missouri Valley. They just came off of a great road win against Arkansas, a very tough place to play. They're a very good team, they're very smart, and that's the key to them, is they are always going to make adjustments on the floor. They're going to look to isolate certain positions and their kids play very smart. They're all very solid shooters, ball-handlers, passers, so we knew that we were going to have to have a great defensive effort to keep them as close to under 60 as possible."
On the game: "We knew that Northern Iowa was probably going to try to take away Evan and Kerensa and they were going to make other people hit those shots for us to win. The play of Angie Carter and Melanie (Fisher) had some key baskets, those are the kinds of things we have to have. Natalie hit key buckets, obviously the more people we can have scoring, the better we're going to be as a team."
On Angie Carter: "That's the best she's looked since she's been on this campus. I felt like Angie could play tonight. I felt like she's been doing some good things in practice, and those are kids she can guard. I knew that we needed an offensive lift, she's been hitting in practice, so you earn your playing time during practice with the kinds of things she's been doing."
On Missouri's defense: "Sometimes the harder we work on defense, the harder it is on offense because we're tired. Especially with Kerensa guarding their key kid, and sometimes that's tough. With our full-court defense, we score a lot off of that."
On finals week at MU: "Right now, their finals are the most important thing. We're giving them the next two days off, which has been unheard of before around here. We want to come back and get ready for Arkansas-Pine Bluff, Illinois, and focus on fine-tuning our defense and offensively, put a couple of more sets in, but basically just keep working with them individually."
Missouri junior guard Kerensa Barr
On the game: "It was a pretty choppy game but we kept trying to carry over our momentum after timeouts."
Her assessment of Missouri going into the winter break: "We have a young team this year and we try to improve every game. I think we've come a long way since our first game. We're trying to get a lot of momentum before the break."
On whether she expected Missouri to be 7-1 at this point: "I'm pleased, I would prefer to be 8-0 at this point, but I'll take 7-1."
On Missouri's defense: "We have a ways to go defensively and getting different lineups in there, some people aren't used to playing together as much. That will definitely come though, as the season progresses."
On defending Northern Iowa: "We tried to put a lot of defensive pressure on them, especially since we knew they had a 6'4" girl. We put pressure on their guards to keep it away from their posts."
Missouri freshman Angie Carter
On her own play: "It felt good to get to play and help out the team. When I went in, I did well, so I guess I earned some more time.
Northern Iowa Coach Tony DiCecco
On the Tigers: "They're the toughest team we've played all year. Their kids are very very well-coached. They were able to take a lot of things away from us, we had no answer for their inside as well as their outside game. It's the best performance against us that we've had all year."
