“Well, tough night for our team. You have to give South Carolina a lot of credit. I thought in the second quarter they really turned up the defensive intensity and we couldn’t score there and that was a difficult part of the game for us. But, you give them credit for playing really hard, they are very talented and we just went on that seven-minute scoring drought and that was just too much to overcome. But, I’m proud of the team for battling in there and working hard throughout the entirety of the 40 minutes and finishing the game off with fight and we found some things that could work. Tough loss, but it’s one loss and we will get ready for the next one and move forward.” 

On if Makayla Epps is injured … 

“Not sure. She just ran off the court there at the end and said get a sub and I don’t know if she tweaked an ankle or what. I’ll let you know.” 

“What I think is important is when a team plays hard on defense and tough defense. I don’t want to talk too much about what we did because they really I thought played tough. A lot of defenses you can wear down over the course of the clock and maybe find a crease once every third or fourth possession to where you don’t go on that long drought – and (Alaina) Coates and (A’ja) Wilson are just so tough at the rim. It’s hard if you’re not making some shots it can snowball pretty quick because it’s so hard to get to the rim. So, you give them credit and they’re a tough team. I’m sure we will go back and see some shots I wish we could have made and I thought that the inability to get the ball in the hole really deflated us and they ran out and got some transition points that turned into a lead that we couldn’t overcome.”

“We tried this week to understand where we are. The kids gave a tough effort over there in Columbia, Missouri. We felt like we needed to have some gas in the tank for tonight. We tried to manage them the last few days. I don’t anticipate that being a huge problem. We aren’t going to have a three-hour session tomorrow, but we will be efficient with our time and prepare really well for Vanderbilt and have a good plan for them when they walk in the door tomorrow. It will be short, but it will be intense. I think we are holding up pretty good. I think we are past – Makenzie’s (Cann) flu took a lot out of her, Taylor (Murray) has a little stuff going on – we don’t know if it’s the start of the flu because she was out Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday so she felt a little bit better today. So hopefully by Sunday we can get past a little bit of this illness that we’ve had and I feel better about being able to bounce back.”

“Well, she just hasn’t progressed out of controlled contact. So now, she’s got to be able to get in. I wouldn’t call it a setback – I would just call it the final hurdle. She felt good today and so we just remain hopeful that she will return any game now. Don’t be surprised if it’s Sunday or next Thursday – we do anticipate her returning. She looks like she is progressing.” 

“I thought we started out in the first quarter with great intensity and they had some kids that had not been shooting the 3 over the course of the season make a couple and I was OK with that, and I thought that we just missed a couple of opportunities offensively. They’re a really powerful team – it was just when they started getting the ball in transition and we started turning the ball over we became disjointed offensively. They are extremely talented, so gifted and in our league there are some teams that maybe have some size and some big kids – and we have decent size with Alyssa (Rice) and Evelyn (Akhator) but Wilson and Coates are just a different level of athletes. They are just fantastic athletes. They can really move and cause you so many problems. We’ll have to play well, we’ll have to shoot the ball well, we’ll have to get them into a spot to where they have a bad shooting night. If they shoot 50 percent, they’re hard to beat. They’re a good team. They’re a really good team. They didn’t do anything to surprise us.” 

“What I wish we would have done was handle the second quarter a little bit better. I thought we started off – it’s hard – when you can’t see the ball go in the basket – it’s hard. But, you hope you progress to a point where you can whether that storm and maybe it’s 8-0 run that you can come back from instead of an 18-0 run that kind of gets it in a spot to where you’ve really got to climb a big mountain to get back into it. So, I wish we could have handled that better. I thought that there were some lapses of effort in that time, but when we called timeout with four minutes to go in the third quarter down 24, I thought we were letting the scoreboard affect us, so we just tried to clear the slate and say how would you play if it was tied up now? We started to lose focus defensively and so we got down on ourselves. I thought we really re-focused and battled and gave a tremendous effort those last 14 minutes of the game. So, you build off that and you sprint into the weekend knowing you’ve got to keep plugging and you put this behind you and get ready for a tough Vandy team. Our kids are battlers and they’ve fought all year long, so I’m excited to go into practice with them tomorrow.”

“I don’t think its energy or anything like that. Usually we think that our third quarter is our worst quarter, so I guess we’ll just have to learn from it. We’ll learn from our mistakes, and we did a lot of good things in the second half, so we’ll just have to build off that.”

“I think we just had bad shot selection, and we just turned the ball over too many times. If we would’ve fixed that, and we would’ve knocked down shots, I feel like it would’ve been a much better ball game. We feel like we can beat South Carolina, so if we fix those things, we’ll be okay.”

“We knew we were going to lose (at some point) it’s unlikely, except for UConn, everybody has been beat. We know we’re going to lose games. We just have to bounce back. We know we have each other’s backs, so we’re going to go into practice tomorrow and work as hard as we can, and just learn from this game.” 

“They’re really big down low. They have tall guards as well, so that had some effect on us. Taylor was talking about it earlier, but I mean we just have to learn from it, and learn how to adjust our offense around it. We’ve just got to be more aggressive. We’re going to have to face teams with their size in the future, and we’re going to have to face South Carolina again in the future, so we have to learn how to deal with it.”

“Most of the shots that we do in practice and shootaround weren’t falling during the game. We’ve just got to keep going and just get stops. We proved that in the second half.”

“I’m just a quick person in transition. I can get past the first person, but then that next person is there, so it forces me to kick it out for a 3-point shot or call something for the team.” 

“I think we kept pushing it in the second half and we scored a lot in the second half, so it’s just about bouncing back and doing what we’re supposed to do no matter what the score is.” 

“No, once we were done after postgame we turned the page. It’s not something we want to continue to talk about. It was a game we lost. We’ve got to move on, and I thought our players did a great job at focusing on the task at hand. You can’t overlook anybody. You have to give everybody in this league the right amount of attention or else they’ll come up and bite you, especially playing on the road.”

“It’s always a barn-burner. Anytime we can get a double-digit lead, or just win, I think it’s always a great thing on either side of it because it’s always come down to a possession here or there.”

“Well, we were pushing the ball. We didn’t rely on just our half-court offense. I thought we turned them over a little bit and pushed the ball down the floor, got some easy buckets. We probably just kind of took the page out of their book. They like to play fast and up-tempo. Sometimes when you’ve got a run going on like that it’s hard to stop the bleeding no matter if it’s us or them against us.”

“She’s always one that thrives on whoever she’s assigned to guard. She makes it very difficult because she’s relentless. She makes it hard for them to touch the ball. So I was really happy and pleased with her relentlessness to just make it difficult for Epps to get touches. We know when she touches the ball magical things happen. She’s done it to this entire league for three-and-a-half years now.”

“Not to us. She is one that competes. She plays exactly how she plays in games in practice. There is no let-off, so for us we see it every day. I think for some other people, and maybe you didn’t see as much of it in North Carolina, but we put a big emphasis on it and she’s taken it to heart.”

“It’s a tough week for us, but we knew what was coming. Our players knew what was coming. So when you know something’s coming, you can plan for it. We’ll take tomorrow off and we’ll have one day to prepare for Arkansas, and we’ll do that.”

“I just knew personnel. I was just playing defense hard and sticking to my assignment of trying to let her score the least possible while I was guarding her.”

“I don’t really think it entered our head. We knew after the game we were just going to have to turn a page and focus on Kentucky. That’s pretty much it and that’s what we did. I felt like we came out first half with a lot of energy. I feel like we just picked ourselves up, and that’s something we do a really good job of because Coach kind of makes us turn the page no matter what. I think we did a pretty good job doing that.”

“It was really when they would go in the zone the high-low was there, but this time it was kind of the low to the high because (Alaina Coates) always dives when they get it low. It’s just seeing the defense and taking what the defense gives us. Today I felt like they were playing us kind of spread out, so we had the open dive and that’s when I hit (Coates).”

“I definitely didn’t know that at all. I think that’s a pretty good feeling for us. That’s just kind of what we do. We’ve just got to keep pushing the ball and converting in transition just getting scores and getting stops.”