May 21, 2005

Robert Morris Head Coach

On how his team played today
"I think that in many ways we did play better today, but we didn't play well enough. Missouri's a great team. They didn't win 40 games playing in a Big 12 schedule for nothing. In the course of our season, we are not adequately prepared or use to the caliber of pitching that we saw this weekend. Hitting has been our strong suit all season, but we clearly weren't hitting the ball well this weekend. We had three hits yesterday and no hits today, so we clearly didn't get the job done today. But we give the credit to Missouri. They're a fantastic team."

Robert Morris program and regionals

We are very pleased we won seven conference championships in the past 15 years. For many of those years our conference did not have an automatic berth to the tournament, especially when it was a 32-team field. This is the first time we won our conference tournament when we had an opportunity to go to Regionals. It is an outstanding experience for our kids and we hope we will be back next year at this site or another. We hope to be much better prepared and know what type of competition to be facing. We will lose two seniors and this team by large will be returning. We hope the second experience will be better than the first.

How you plan on improving for next year.

We will be playing in a tournament at Ohio State, which will have a number of ranked teams. Next year, as more of a senior team, we will increase the difficulty of our schedule, so we hope to be prepared better for next time.

On what he told his team after the games.

I told them that we certainly got thumped today and yesterday. I didn't want them to lose sight of where we came from. We won 12 games last year, and struggled because we were a very young team. We had almost all freshmen in our infield, pitcher and catcher. This year we had developed to the point where we won 29 ballgames, won our conference regular season by a two-game margin and hosted and won our conference tournament. We think we made big strides this year, and we want to keep everything in perspective and realize that we have had a successful season. We're not going to let these two games get in the way of their enthusiasm of we are going to accomplish next year.

Missouri Outfielder Micaela Minner

On her homerun
It was the first pitch. I took advantage of it, was aggressive, and hit a homerun. I didn't try to.

On facing SIU again.
I'm ready. We've seen Amy (Harre) twice, so third time's a charm. I think, I mean I don't think, I know, that we're going to come out ready to play. In our short break, we're going to bond as a team, stay energized and eat Dippin' Dots.

Coach Singleton

We're pleased to win and pleased to be in the post season still. It's nice to get a win in post-season and we are ready to play Carbondale tonight.

Different plan against SIU

We need to take advantage of our opportunities, we had runners in scoring position and did not drive them in. We hit the ball hard yesterday, we had seven hits but hit the ball hard 10 times on the chart I was keeping track on. We didn't hit the ball hard when we had people in scoring position. That's something we need to do today, it will be a fun game. Both games against Southern Illinois have been fun, obviously we did not come out on top, but we are going to change that. They are a very good team and the energy and enthusiasm at their place was fun. It was a great environment yesterday afternoon. It was a fun game! It was not fun to lose, but a fun environment and fun place to play. Both those games could have gone either way. So hopefully tonight, we play well enough to make it go the other way.