Albright Addresses Media Monday
November 25, 2002 | Women's Basketball
Wisconsin women's basketball coach Jane Albright spoke to the media on Monday during UW's weekly news conference. Albright addressed various issues about the team.
A transcript of the news conference follows. The news conference video is available by clicking on `multimedia' on the red menu bar.
What areas will you emphasize this week' 'That's a great question; we have an unlimited amount of areas we could work on. It's really a matter of what the most urgent [area] is. It's all very important that we get it right. We're not going to panic because it is so early. If we're five games into the season and we have not had any better individual performances then we'll tweak some things, but right now we'll go the distance with what we're trying to do. Offensively, first of all, we 've corrected the area of shooting percentages which was really low on Friday night and we had 24 turnovers. Our offenses are not clicking, we start out with something, [and if] it doesn't start working within 30 seconds and we just go away from it so we haven't had a lot of discipline in that area against two good defensive teams. We aren't able to follow through with that and we haven't gotten a lot of easy buckets. Defensively, our zones are not being covered properly at all which I would expect because we really have not played a lot of zone here, but our man [defense] is not being played well either. We helped way too much on all their shooters yesterday and that was the one thing we know we are not supposed to do. Anytime a team is 8-for-10 from the three-point line you're not following the defensive game plan. We'll keep working on the same things'we didn't do something that we felt great about'rebounding has been pretty good, but that's something that we have to keep expecting to be good. We've got to get better and you've got to either play some type of zone or man [defense] unless you know another type of defense. You 've got to be good at one of them, so, we will be good at one of them and hopefully we can be good at more than one of them.'
Do the turnovers start with the point guard ' 'I don't think so after looking at the tape. I think the timing starts with the point guard and the wings working together. Ashley had one of those turnovers yesterday and played a lot of minutes, in the Northern [Illinois] game she had what you would expect her first game to be, but the turnovers were not from our point guard spot. Stephanie had them yesterday and she was a one and a two, but I don't think that's typical'Green Bay did a great job [on] Ashley and so she didn't handle it as much as you would on a normal night, but I think'lots of people turn the ball over.'
Was the lack of continuity on offense expected with all of the changes coming into the season' Probably that and the fact that I 'm not playing anybody long enough. We keep solving a lot and trying different combinations, like we don't know if we're going to start the same group again. We have been mostly playing seven players, but then Jordan actually had one of the better performances'what we've got to do as a staff, is because our team has executed very well in practice and done some things very well and when we get our guys ' practice squad in working our team [we need to transfer that to the court]. When we get out of the practice gym when there are referees and people there we have not done that. So what we have to figure out is how to transfer practice to the game. If we haven 't seen it in practice, then we've got a lot more problems, but we have seen it in the players and now [it's just] how long will it take us. But we definitely had no offense rhythm. None. We needed WD40. We were just squeaking. '
Do you foresee making any changes in the lineup if things don 't improve this weekend' 'We will keep changing our starting lineup until we get a group that we feel is efficient. It may not be our best five players. We might have the kind of team that our best five players are not our most efficient unit. We don't really know that. That's what we're still searching for and we're watching a lot of tape and we're looking at a lot of combinations in practice to see who plays well together.'
How does your team stack up against this weekend's opposition' 'Right now I think it's more of how our team stacks up within ourselves. We knew that these two teams are veteran teams. Pepperdine is a veteran team, if we get to play them. At this point in time, I don't think you make any assumptions of what game you're going to be in. I don't think that they're high powered, scoring offensively. [Texas] Arlington isn 't. But then again, we've given up a lot of high percentage shots. I think it's early enough that there's not a lot of strategy involved except for us getting better at what we do.'
What are some of the positives you can take from your first two games' 'Well, I learned that when a group of people play together and no one is really stepping up and being successful in performance it's hard to keep going and this group kept going. It's a really hard thing when you know [and] you feel like you're better than you are'it's very objective. Objectively, in the stat sheet, if someone gave you the stat sheet on my team, people would just say `wow, I can't believe that.' We don't believe the stat sheet can beat us. We think we can go in today and correct some things and keep getting better. I don't think that [the last] two games were that much different than the exhibition games. We have the same problems in the two games that we did in the exhibition games. We improved a little bit in some areas, but then we didn 't [in other areas]. It's kind of like the itsy-bitsy spider, you go up three steps and down two and up three and down two. We've got to keep going and quit the down two. It's early and I certainly hope that we can.'
What do you think is the problem with Stephanie Rich 's shooting' 'It's not mechanical'she 's trying to create too many of her shots. [She's] overanxious, she put in a lot of minutes working on her shooting game and has had some great dominating practices and now she wants to show that and help us. All the players want to help us win and that's what she thinks she does best and so I think she's really pushing her shot. You could tell, because when she did hit her first shot yesterday there was a big sigh of relief and you could at least see that really had been bothering her. '
Thoughts on Kristi Seeger: 'The better she gets, the more she's got to carry the load [for us]. Her shooting percentage is very high; she's got to take more shots and more of the offensive load to help us win. She can't be content with being a role player. Right now, I think Kristi thinks her game is to rebound, get the offensive putback and score, or play defense and we need her to do more than that for us and we'll be talking with her about that. I know she can do that, it's just the changing of the guard type of thing. '
Will she respond' 'I think she will. I think the players on this team will embrace anything we can tell them to do to help us win. Losing is not fun, it's not fun to lose by a lot, it's not fun to lose on a last second shot when a player who was 1-for-9 hits it. That's not fun. It's not fun to lose by 25 to an instate rival. Everybody has their theories, but it's just basically that losing is not a lot of fun'close or by a lot. '
Are you heading out to Washington for Emily' Do you usually try to do that' 'It's 100 percent the reason why we're going out there. Just like we'll go to South Carolina for Sasha. That's what we tell them when we recruit them, that we'll go home at least once when they're here and possibly twice.'
Thoughts on Pepperdine tournament: 'I don 't know anybody out there. We try to take a trip there, it seems like it will be good competition and it can be someplace that's not 20 degrees. I talked to someone out there today and they said they were walking on the beach yesterday in a t-shirt and shorts and when I walked my dogs I had a toboggan and a scarf and gloves and a big winter coat. I think we can handle that and good competition. It's not a vacation. If you're going to be in a gym, it might as well be in a gym in Malibu. '
Thoughts on Ashley Josephson 'She 's really embracing this challenge and really wanting to help us and is extremely coachable and is really trying to figure out what she can do. She looked to score more yesterday when we weren't able to score. She took some shots I thought, very aggressively, and I think she'll continue to do that. On her high school team she didn't score as much, but when her AAU team won the national championship she was a big scorer on that team and I think she's very capable of doing both: when people around you are scoring, you don't have to score if you're the point guard, but when they're not, you've got to step up.'
When will you know you're starting lineup ' 'I have no idea. There's just a lot of things to look at now. Yesterday, one of the reasons we changed, defensively we didn't feel like we could guard Green Bay with our two big players, the way they spread that offense. But then we didn't really guard them well with our smaller players either. We will decide if it will be a defensive change or an offensive lineup. Leah was actually inserted for her defense, not her offense. She probably thinks it's because she's our leading scorer.'
Thoughts on defensive help: 'Our game plan was not to help. So, we don't know where that came from. We knew that Green Bay could shoot. They proved it. So we were never supposed to be trying to help. We have a team, like you heard Stephanie say yesterday, we have a team that likes to help one another. They've got to have a little more independence. We've got to stop penetration and we way overhelped, and they made us pay for it. And the whole first half would have been a different game and it's a ball game if we don't do that. I think they were up by eight and there were eight three-pointers. So it would have been an even game if we had not done that. They knew they weren't supposed to do that. And that's just lack of discipline, it's lack of knowing what you're supposed to do and doing it. But we're so young, we don't have a lot of people we can put in and say you do it because they haven't had to do it. We'll work through it. [It's] not that hard of a thing to do. '
