March 15, 2010
SAN DIEGO -
San Diego State head coach Steve Fisher
Opening statement:
"This is a good day to be an Aztec. (SDSU women's basketball head coach) Beth Burns will find out very shortly who she plays in the NCAA Tournament. I hope she doesn't have to go quite as far as we do to play. We are finalizing our plans to head out to Providence, getting ready to put in a game plan on Tennessee, and going with the intent of playing and winning two games.
"We will meet a very, very formidable foe in the University of Tennessee. I have known Bruce Pearl since both of our days as assistant coaches in the Big Ten. He was at Iowa for Dr. Tom Davis. He was the bird at Boston College as the mascot for Dr. Tom. So it's Tom Davis' style of play and they do it very well. They're very athletic, long, and they are the only team in America that's beaten two No. 1 seeds, Kentucky and Kansas. So that's all you need to say about how good are they. They're good, very good. We're excited to be playing them and we're going in with the intent of winning. And I think if we play the way we have, we'll have a great chance to do just that."
On SDSU having zero NCAA Tournament wins as a Division I program:
"We've made reference to it. We've talked about it at various times during the season, climbing the ladder to get where you want to go. Now we are where we want to go and that's the NCAA Tournament. We're in the big lake, we're in the big pool and now we have to take that next step and win. This will be our third try since I've been here. This will be our best opportunity to get a victory and we've talked about that. We want to have a legacy with this group, this team, that they can come back and say they were the first and that's our goal. We want to be the first to win in the NCAA Tournament. And it's easy to say and been proven hard to do, but we're capable of doing it."
On Tennessee:
"Tennessee has the ability to press like (UNLV). They now have a little bit shorter bench than they did early in the season so they don't press as much. They don't run as much, but when they do, they present some problems. They're like us, long and athletic. They can guard you 1-5. They're capable of switching a lot of things and making it hard for you to get the ball inbounded. They score very effectively in the broken floor. They will rebound that ball and push. The rebounder will try to push and take it to the rim. Any one of three or four guys can do that. They are a fun team to watch and they have multiple scorers like us. I believe their leading scorer is at about 14 and they have four or five guys in double digits, so they're a hard guard."
On momentum:
"We sell and build on that. They're saying it's a whole new ballgame. If you have character and quality people, like I know Tennessee does, they'll forget about their last game and they'll forget about the losses they've had and they'll be focused on winning. Bruce Pearl is a master motivator. He's talking about not being respected. They should be a three seed opposed to what they are, on and on and on. You take wherever you are and try to turn it into a chip that you can say why it's good for us to be this. We're doing that and they're doing that, but maybe in two different veins."
On the injury front:
"Our injury updates are, we are in good shape. Chase's (Tapley) hand gave him some struggles in the (MWC) tournament, yet he toughed his way through it. (He) struggled a little bit in his last game where he felt like he couldn't dribble the ball. I think the padding wasn't quite what he liked, then he got hit, then I yelled at him and then he didn't play real well. But he'll be ready. Chase is a wonderful young guy, who if we didn't have him against Colorado State, we're dead in the water. If we didn't have him against New Mexico ... he hits 3-for-4 from three-point range. So he'll be ready. Everybody else is fine."
On how to calm the team down:
"What you try to do is make it business as usual as much as you can. There are certain obligations you have that come with the NCAA Tournament. Right now, they're over in the arena filling out forms, certifying things, taking thumb prints to certify to be able to compete. We have some obligations that are there, including an open 40-minute practice that we have to go to, but we did a little bit of that at the Mountain West tournament. But you prepare the same. We played Saturday and now we play Thursday. It's like a Saturday, Thursday game in our league where you take Sunday off and you start preparing the next day for your next opponent and that's what we're doing.
"They might be a little extra nervous, which is natural. But when they throw the ball up and start playing, those nerves should dissipate and they go into being what you've done since you first bounced a ball and made your first basket and that's what good players and teams are able to do. Hopefully we will be able to do that."
On what is needed to be successful in the NCAA Tournament:
"The one truism is that you need good players, plural, underline, underline, underline. And the more you have, the more chances you have to advance. In the old days, if you have three potential pros on the team, you have a chance. But you have to have good players. Some people say guard play is the most important. More people say that than a big man, but you need basketball players, who can play unafraid and we have that and we have enough of that. And you have to be lucky. In all probability, the team that wins the national championship or teams that advance from here to the Sweet 16, will need a break or two. They will need to keep people in games. Maybe they'll get a ball that rolls in for them and out for the other team. That'll happen. It happened to us in the Mountain West Conference Tournament. We know that. We are one play away, one foul called at mid-court away in the Colorado State game to be talking about who we are playing in the NIT. It's that close and it will be that close in this NCAA Tournament for a lot of teams. I hope that we have two straight double-digit victories, but more importantly I hope we come away with two victories no matter how we get them.