Opening Statement…

“I can tell you, LSU is going to be a very difficult game. They are No. 1 in the conference in disrupting you and causing turnovers. They have very dynamic athletes where they can go get rebounds, offensive rebounds, very athletic, very aggressive and relentless. And so we’re trying to work really hard to improve to get better, but in preparation for this game I really think we’re going to have to play with great poise, offensively take care of the ball. Ball security will be a major issue in this game. We need to concentrate and try to take care of the ball the best we can. We need to continue to improve as a rebounding team. I don’t care what kind of a game you’re in. In this league, that just always seems to be a big factor in the game, so it will be a tremendous challenge and we’re going to work hard to try to prepare and see if we can get a victory.”

On why this team has had better ball security than past teams … 

“Well, I just think that we’ve had a lot more patience this year offensively. Our post players turned it over a ton last year. We had a lot of walks, travels, things of that nature with our pivot foot. You know, we’ve done a good job of not getting in a rush. I think Taylor (Murray) and Maci (Morris) being sophomores, they went through some battles last year where they turned the ball over some and I think they’re improved with their ball handling. We worked hard on it during the summer. I can’t tell you exactly why, but we need to be that kind of team because we don’t cause a ton of turnovers. Turnovers margin’s a real big indicator of victory in my mind. I think it’s really important to win that battle. If you do that consistently, I think you’re going to win more than you lose. So, we’ve done a good job with that. Evelyn (Akhator) doesn’t turn it over as much as she did last year. So, I think just the improvement and us working and trying to get better as an offensive team has helped us. But this is a team in LSU that is just relentless defensively. They just feed off of their turnovers and points off of turnovers, so we’ll have to really work hard and see if we can go down there and operate the game in a successful manner.”

On if they’ve solved their problems with inbounding that they experienced at Louisville…

“Well, we’re better than that day. I don’t know how much worse you can get. I think we turned it over just about every time on the inline that day. We’ve tried to work on it. We’ve had so many things to try to get better. I still wish we were better there. We’re going to try to continue to improve. We’ve gotten to a spot where instead of trying to score, we’re just trying to get the ball in and that takes some time and some reps. We’ve got a segment in practice today where we’re going to try to work some live plays there on the inline so we can score because it’s an important part of the game.”

On whether they do anything special to simulate a defense like they’ll face at LSU…

“Every now and then. The practice yesterday was very aggressive. We did not have success always. We got better as practice went along. So, you know, we’re definitely trying to turn up the heat and make them feel the heat as much as possible. So, it does help you sometimes to try and throw an extra one out there or you know force them into spots. There’s a fine line. You don’t want them looking for traps and being so tentative and waiting to get trapped, but you do need to get them trapped a few times where they’re just not having success if something does go wrong it’s definitely a possibility with such a good defense as LSU has. You do want them to feel that and you want to have a plan. We tried the best that we can to simulate it and they just do a really good job. It’s not the defense that we run, so then there’s the element of how well can you replicate that and we’ll have to see what we can do. But I think that we have done a good job this year of attacking defenses that are aggressive and that’s the mindset. I think we have to go down there and not break the press but really attack it or break the 2-3, trapping, half-court. They do some really great things defensively and you know, when two are guarding one, somebody’s open so you just have to try to be aggressive and make that play and really try to make them pay for playing that type of defense. So it’ll be a really interesting game to see who wins out.”

On if Jessica Hardin is expected to play this week…

“No, she’s going to stay here. She is progressing though. We feel really good that we can get her back in the foreseeable future. This isn’t the time on the road. She’s still is not practicing while she’s improving. She’ll stay here and work out with Coach Spurlock and we’ll have the doctors check her out, but she’s not (playing). We’d love to see some progress this week and hopefully she can get back on the court next week, but again, it’s a day-to-day thing. It’s a protocol you have to work through, so she will not play this weekend.”

On if Makenzie Cann is finding her way now after finally shedding her mask…

“You know, she always gives really great effort in practice. I think the mask was just a huge relief. I think it was just a constant bother. It was just hard to get out of her mind and I don’t think we can realize how difficult it is to play with that thing on. It was just very difficult to play. She hustled and gave us some great minutes. I don’t know if it’s the mask or not. Sometimes in the middle of the season, all of us can have these times. So, maybe it was the mask, maybe she just worked her way out of it. I will tell you, whether she had the mask or not she stayed every day, working, working, working. So I don’t want to say it was as simple as that. That takes away from how hard she’s worked and persevered to try to through it. She started the conference I think 1-for-11, and she’s not a 1-for-11 3-point shooter. Now she’s been close to 50 (percent) in the last two games and that’s much more like it. I think, for us to be successful, ultimately be the team we want to be, we’re asking her to shoot somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 percent from the 3-point line and she’s capable of doing that and once she does that it really lifts our team.”

On how he’s seen Jaida improve in the last few games…

“It was important. I think when Jess went out it was just, ‘We don’t have another option but for you to step up,’ and I think she was kind of caught in that freshman mire of, ‘I didn’t think it was going to be this hard. It shouldn’t be this hard. What I did in high school should work,’ and you just go through that as a freshman and especially when you are physically a little bit smaller than what a lot of the guards you’re playing against are, you’ve got to figure out how to do the finer points of the game. Starts and stops are the biggest things for her. She’s getting out of stops which makes you quicker, so we can’t really make you a mile an hour faster out of the top end but we can make you quicker out of starts and stops if you commit to our footwork program. We really work on that – changing directions, playing with pace. So, she’s taken a huge step forward in that, just committing to our footwork, staying extra, getting out of starts and stops, listening to the coaching and she just practiced a lot harder and practiced more. She stayed you know on her own personal time and worked. I think just a little bit of recognition of what she needed to do to be successful. She still has a ton of room for improvement, which all freshman do even going out of your freshman year to your sophomore year. She’ll still get better, but I just think it’s a greater commitment to work and a greater commitment to the details and the work you have to put in. It’s made a huge difference in our team. You know, I’m so happy for her and really happy for our team because we desperately needed production from her and these are real SEC games. This is not phony. This is not fake. She’s making contributions every step of the way even if it’s not seven or eight points. It’s given us some quality minutes and it’s been good for our team.”

On what Jaida Roper has improved on in last few weeks…

“I think just the way she moves. She is just kind of, I don’t think she understood the pace of how much you have to play and how hard you have to play and how much attention she has to pay to changing ends of the floor, moving laterally to try to keep the ball in front of you, north-south drive, not being casual, those kinds of things. You play high school and you are an all-star player and everything you do works. Kind of maybe doing it at 75 percent and you don’t realize it is 75 percent. You think that is 100 percent and you get here and 75 percent gets you down to like how other people play at 50 percent. It is just one of those things that you don’t understand and that is all I can tell you is that she got better recognition of it. We really, really need her from now to the end of the season to commit to making open shots because it appears the way people are playing they are trying to take away E (Akhator) and Epps and Maci (Morris) and they are just going to give people open looks and we need to make them pay when they do that. Jaida is getting a lot of really wide-open looks from 3. Again, I don’t think she understood how many reps she needed outside of practice. She has now. I think you are going to see her shooting improve over the next month because she is committing time to it.” 

On losing the last three at LSU…

“Yeah. LSU is good. They always have a really good team and it is not the building. But, it is difficult to go on the road. It is much harder to win on the road than it is at home. But, they have had good teams. You know, every year I can go back and tell you how they did it. They just play really tough down there and it is a hard place to win and it will be hard this year. They have another great team this year, well coached. Nikki (Caldwell) just does a great job. So, there is nothing weird about the building or anything or any voodoo going on down there or anything like that. It is just they had really great teams, really quality teams and we have just come up short the last few times. But, it doesn’t have any impact on this game. I don’t think anybody can remember that game that is on our team now. It is just the one in front of us. If we turn it over less than they do and we out rebound them then we will have a chance to win the game. The building won’t have anything to do with that unless they raise some of the lines and are tripping us. But you would think that maybe LSU would trip over them unless they know the lines are raised and they avoid the lines. So, maybe the building could get us, but I highly doubt it.” 

On the SEC being so difficult…

“I’m with you. I understand the question and it is. But, you just have to stay focused on each day and you have to, this is my opinion, you have to think about your team. How are you going to get, and your staff, and your players, how are we all going to collectively get the very best out of our team?  And every opponent poses different challenges and different things to test you and to stress you and to stretch your abilities and you have to find the opportunity to get that done and in practice verses each other and for us it is just Kentucky first. What can we do to improve our team and if we are playing our best basketball we will have a chance in these games. It is real hard. You win them by one point. You lose them by one point. It is really a fine line between 5-0, 3-5, 3-2, 2-3. It ‘s a difficult league. It always has been. But the way we approach it is trying to think about our team everyday. How can we improve? How can we take another step forward and just almost myopic in that term in relation to how you really approach this because if you get to looking down the road and we need this and we need that, I have always found for me that drives me crazy to try to predict the future. So, we just try to control each and every day and this team has done a great job over the last couple weeks. We have really gotten better. Will it translate into wins? I think it will. But, you have to go play the games but it is a tough league. ”

On the players having fun and winning…

“It is a little bit of both. There is no doubt about it. You know, if you are in a 25 game losing streak and you are telling everybody to have fun, I mean, I don’t think that is realistic. You can’t do it. For us though, it was important after that Texas A&M game, we were not reacting, emotionally, in the huddles, the way we should have in that game. You know, we were up six or we were down two or whatever. We just seemed to be really stressed out in that game like this is a real important, big game, which they all are but you can’t play them that way. You have to play them with some thought of I am going to go out here and make plays and make it fun and play together. So, we met together individually with every player after the Texas A&M game and I think it really helped because we have to have a certain number of wins to get in the NCAA tournament. We are worried about seeding. We are worried about ‘are we going to win another game?’ things that people were thinking about that were not contributing to winning. But, we tried to clear the air there, the best I could as their coach, tried to ensure everyone that their role is what they can come out and do today to help your team be successful and just concentrate on those three or four little bullet points. You know, not anything complicated and we really attacked practice last week with some enthusiasm and I really give Evelyn Akhator a lot of credit for that. I think she really tried to step up as an emotional leader last week and so we did. We had better time. We had more fun in practice because people were playing games. They weren’t weighed down with the burden of stress and I think it showed in the two games. This is a team that’s very high achievers. They are great kids. They are high character. Sometimes that gets you down the wrong road of thinking that you have got to do this or that and I am too much inside of my head and I am not having enough fun. So, you can’t just be sunshine and rainbows all the time and hey, let’s just go out here and have fun but you can’t be totally stressed with I have got to do this or I have got to do that. So, you have to strike that balance and I think the team has done a good job with the effort and enthusiasm and energy in practice and I think that is where it all starts.”