Postgame Quotes: Lady Vols 75, Ole Miss 66

Tennessee Head Coach Holly Warlick

Opening statement:
"I thought we started off really strong. We got into foul trouble. It was tough. Our two point guards sat on the bench the second quarter, and that hurt us. We came out strong in the third quarter, and we really stepped up the fourth quarter. I thought Rennia (Davis) and Annie (Anastasia Hayes) were awesome in the fourth quarter. They didn't play like freshmen. They were poised. They attacked. I'm just really proud of them to step up to the challenge."

On playing zone defense:
"(Madinah) Muhammad was outstanding. We spread our zone out and communicated and talked and located shooters. It looked like a sagging man-to-man. We just extended our defense. When you're all five talking and moving, we played great defense. At times we were good, and when we needed to, we were really good."

On the preference of playing man-to-man over zone defense:
"I'm going to play whatever helps us win. I always want to play man-to-man. I can be a great 40 minute zone coach if it is going to help us win. My biggest thing is communicating and effort. We have to get better on ball screens, and we have worked on it. We got a little hesitant and timid when we got in foul trouble. We can't get ourselves in that situation."

On the foul trouble throughout the game:
"I guess we had our hands on them, and they are going to call that foul. I don't know how many charges we had, five, six, I don't know. We have to adjust and pull up. There are so many things we can get better at. You have to understand how the game is being officiated and officials are calling what they are supposed to call. That's the hand check and touching twice; that is just what they are emphasizing. My thing is I get that. We need to adjust to that. The game has gotten really physical inside, and we have to adjust to that too. We got a little timid once we got into foul trouble, and rightfully so."

On the importance of Jaime Nared rebounding and scoring:
"Jaime (Nared) is our do-everything player. She was at the point at one time in the second quarter. I thought Jaime did a great job of taking good shots and making sure the team was where it needed to be. She was very in tune with our coaching staff. She makes us go, and ten rebounds are huge for us on the defensive end. We had to use her in different ways as far as posting her up, handling the ball. I thought she stepped up and help us big time."

On extending the bench in the first half and keeping the same five in the second half:
"We were up by two at half, and I felt like we didn't have the opportunity to afford not to have our starting five in the second half. I am glad to see Kasi (Kushkituah) in. She had a great week of practice. She's young, and she is going to learn. Kasi is going to be a great post player for us. Cheridene (Green) came in and did some good things. I thought Kortney (Dunbar) was big. She shot three shots inside the three, and I have been trying to get her to do that. Then they throw it out to her on the three point, and I'm like, 'You need to shoot the three!' I was proud of them, as well. We got some good minutes. We got some good rest, and they had to step up because we were in foul trouble. I thought their play was huge for us. We are going to try to get them more minutes because we have to find a little bit of rest for both Jaime (Nared) and Mercedes (Russell).

On Anastasia Hayes shooting the three:
"Absolutely, she can make those. She is a slasher and a penetrator. She didn't hesitate one bit to shoot the three, and I wasn't telling her not to. She can do that, that's why she is a very difficult player to defend. Tonight, she just happened to use her three because they were way off of her. She shot it and didn't even think about. I thought the turning point for her and the team (was when) Annie got beat on the drive. I mean just flat out beat on the drive, and (she) turned around and came back, and it was game on from there. She is a competitor, and it just took that one chance of her getting beat on the defensive end, and she picked it up. I thought she made great decisions tonight. She had a break that normally she would have gone in one-on-four, and she looked and pulled it back out. She played the game the smartest I've seen her play. We needed her to. She stepped up and helped us separate."

On the concern of the outside shooting:
"I'm not so concerned about that. I want us to penetrate and get inside shots. I thought tonight we could've penetrated the gaps a little bit more. We're shooting the ball well in practice. We are getting a lot of shots up. The kids are getting in the gym on their own. Those shots will come, and that's just confidence. At half, I thought we should've been penetrating a lot more than shooting threes. I'll have to go back and watch it, but I thought we could've gotten in the gaps more. That is something we will look at and adjust. We have to be better than two for 11. If we are going to shoot it, then it has to be a higher percentage."

On having six steals tonight:
"I would love us to get more steals. We are getting out in the passing lanes. We really worked on that before this game, and they are getting it. These freshman have been solid. The last two weeks they have been beaten up by people. They are freshman, and they are still learning. They are good, and we are going to keep going to them. We are going to keep giving them opportunities, and they are going to continue to get better as long as they play hard. And this group plays hard. They have a tremendous love for this program. I am going to keep playing them because I know what they stand for. I know how hard they play. We have had little bumps in the road with the last couple games. We are young, but we keep competing. I want to see us keep competing, and we did tonight. We had to."

On the problem of ball screens:
"It's a combination of a lot of things. A lack of communication, not adjusting our feet, not attacking the ball, not stepping out. We have the ability to do it, but it's not consistent. We have to be consistent. We have to find something that works for us and stick with it. We tried about three things tonight. We would go to plan A, and it wasn't very good. We went to plan B and C. We just have to continue to work on it."

On Anastasia Hayess progress:
"Annie (Anastasia Hayes) is a competitor, but she is quiet. It's been like pulling teeth to get her to talk. She's learning our offense and getting very comfortable running our offense. Evina (Westbrook) and her play really well together. As long as she keeps developing her outside shot, she is just a dangerous kid. She is so quick to the basket, and that is so hard to guard. Stay the course. She gets down on herself a bit. She's a heck of a player, and she is just going to continue to get better. I think she can be a better defender. Sometimes she gets stuck and disappointed, but she'll get better. She has ice in her veins. She doesn't panic, and she doesn't worry. She may be on the inside, but on the outside she doesn't, and I like that."

On Rennia Davis's play:
"She is tough on herself, too. I thought she played overall her best game. She rebounded. She is an offense threat when she wants to be. She is in the gym quite a bit. She is going to continue to get better. She hasn't scratched the surface yet. Her ball handling is going to get better, and everything about her game is going to get better. She's pretty solid right now."

On playing LSU:
"I talked to Nikki (Fargas) yesterday. I asked her what kind of defense she was going run. She said their match-up zone. We are going to have to be ready for it. She isn't going to falter to far from that. It is very good. She has two guards that are playing lights out. They are going to rebound the basketball. We are going to have play defense for more than one shot. We are going to try to speed the game up. She may try to slow it down. It's always a battle. One year, we played them we were up and fouled with .5 seconds to go. Crazy things have happened down there. We are going to work on our zone offense in the next two days and guarding ball screens. She is going to go out there and set a screen on us, if they'll let her… Nikki is having a great year. Her kids understand her system, and they are going to be solid. They will play hard. I wouldn't expect anything less."

Tennessee Freshman Rennia Davis On sitting the bench because of foul trouble:
"It helped us realize that we need to be in the game. We need to try to be smarter with defense and how we pick up our fouls."

On meeting Chamique Holdsclaw earlier this season and what it means to her:
"She was one of the best players to ever play here. It was very inviting of her to want to take a picture with me. That was big for me, that she accepted me and that I was able to meet her."

On her offensive game tonight:
"(I shot) layups. I didn't take any jump shots the whole game. My teammates were able to find me. In practice we have been going over going backdoor more when teams are over-playing us. My teammates were just able to find me on all of those backdoor cuts."

Tennessee Senior Jaime Nared

On being more comfortable in a zone or a man to man defense…
"We have to hunker down and play a man-to-man defense. At the end of the day that's what it is. We weren't doing that, in the first half especially. When we were playing the zone in the first half we were trying to find their shooters. We knew Muhammad was a great scorer for them, and she had the majority of their points. We knew we had to find her. I think that at the end of the day, we shouldn't have to default to a zone. We should be able to play one-on-one defense, we just have to work on it."

On not being locked into the zone immediately…
"We had to adjust because Muhammad was running baseline. The zone was definitely distorted as far as a person running through it. We just had to talk; that was the biggest thing. We got some stops, which was just us talking and communicating when someone was out of their normal position. We just had to communicate and rotate."

On it being tough to play through ball screens…
"We just have to do a better job guarding their ball screens. I think they scored too easily on ball screens and drives. We just have to go back to work on guarding those. We had to negate on our original plan, and it was just us wanting to guard the ball screens. They just kept getting by us too easily. We have to get back to the drawing board on how we guard it."

Tennessee Freshman Anastasia Hayes

On her three-point game coming alive tonight…
"I've always known I can shoot, but I haven't really had the confidence to shoot it. These last few days, that's what I have been working on, shooting."

On running track in high school and getting out quickly on the fast break…
"I just used my speed. Usually I see when my teammates get the rebound. If I see the court wide open, I'm going to run the lanes. Usually, if I'm open my teammates pass it to me. Yeah, I guess my speed is really helpful."

On the team's three point shooting…
"I would say that we just have to keep working on it. We have really good three point shooters. In practice we just need to work on having confidence and knowing that we are going to make the three."

Ole Miss Head Coach Matt Isnell

Opening Statement:
"All credit to Tennessee, they have a really good team and they play really, really hard together. They handled some adverse situations there when we made a run on them to get back in the game. We got it to 49-49 and had a lot of momentum there, but we just couldn't get some shots to go there offensively and allowed them to go on another spurt. I'm proud of how our players handled adversity themselves. They came back in a lot of situations and kept believing in each other and believing in our game plan and gave ourselves a chance to win. There are games we have to win, and we will win those games moving forward. We'll have to regroup, it doesn't get any easier. We have to play Mississippi State on Sunday, and we'll be ready to play again then."

On Ole Miss' recent four game losing streak:
"I think a lot gets made about Tennessee's stretch, but I don't think anybody has really looked ate our stretch in January. We're the only team in our league that has played everybody that's in the top four of the league. And we're about to play another one on Sunday. We've had a tough stretch. We have a tough schedule, and we know that. We're having to play, obviously, with a lot of injuries right now - in particular, a kid that's our preseason all-league player. So if you have her, you feel a lot more comfortable. But I'm proud of the way our kids have been battling. We gave one away on Sunday against Florida, a game that we are frustrated about. (We) should've won that one. (We) gave one away earlier in the year at Arkansas, and very easily should be sitting here at 3-3 instead of 1-6, but I'm encouraged by the way we continue to fight. We'll continue to fight. Anybody that knows anything about my teams knows that we're not going to give in. We have a lot of games left to play. We're very confident that as we move forward and as we get better, we can make a big run at the end of this season. We're very confident in that, and there has not been a team this year than we have been just outmanned by. You'd like to play them all with healthy bodies, I can tell you that. Especially tonight."

On Madinah Muhammad's performance and Tennessee switching to the zone defense:
"I think (Madinah) Muhammad is a player that a lot of people talk about in this league. She's a player that night in and night out is consistently getting 18, 19, 20 points. She's a player that day in and day out works harder than the majority of players in this league. Her success tonight is not a surprise — 32 points, eight rebounds. I challenged her about getting on the boards and playing harder on the rebounding end, and she did. She came out tonight and was more relaxed. She's put a lot of pressure on herself, trying to make up for the loss of Shandricka Sessom all by herself at times — her and Alissa (Alston). I've had to talk to them all the time and tell them to not put that pressure on themselves, but I'm just really proud of her. I wish more people would talk about her. I'll continue to talk about her and tell people that she's one of the best players in this league. She sliced up Tennessee probably as well as anybody has all year from a guard spot. With them going zone, it was a good adjustment by Holly (Warlick). Obviously guarding us in man-to-man is tough, and that's what we want you to guard us in. She went zone because she realized that, at times, we have a couple kids on the court that can't or don't shoot. They could shoot; they shoot well in practice. But she went zone, she matched up hard on Alissa and Madinah and tried to take them away and take Promise (Taylor) and Shelby (Gibson) away. And that is what is. We executed. We got some shots. We had a couple violations. And I don't mind the shot clock violations. Tennessee's really good if they rebound, and they're really good if you let them get out in transition. I told our team, 'Don't force a pass up into the front court to allow a breakaway layup or something like that, I'd rather take the shot clock violation.' And they just kept executing, they kept grinding it out, and we're alright. We're young, we've played the toughest schedule in this league so far in terms of in-league, and they'll keep battling. Come the end of the year, you'll see something special in the SEC Tournament. There isn't any quit in this bunch, or me."

Ole Miss Guard Madinah Muhammad

On what changed for Ole Miss during Tennessee's run late in the third quarter:
"I think we stopped being aggressive, which is what helped us come back and tie the game up. When they fell back into the zone, we kind of had a hard time reading how to attack the basket, and that kind of slowed us down a bit. And then I think they just got some momentum going back in transition. We stopped getting back, and we stopped getting stops, so they just ended up getting the momentum back."

On her reaction to receiving a technical foul late in the game:
"I was more upset about the foul call, but being a leader, that was bad sportsmanship on my part, and I'm supposed to be smarter in those situations. I got really emotional in the moment, and that hurt my team. I know doing that gave Tennessee even more momentum, so I'll learn from that, and it won't ever happen again. I need to control my emotions."