Coach Q's Pre-ACC Teleconference

March 3, 2014
Coach Quentin Hillsman
ACC Women's Basketball Pre-Tournament Teleconference
Listen to the Teleconference

Coach Hillsman if you could, please talk a little bit about your team heading into the tournament this week.

"Well I think the most important thing for us going into this week is that we wanted to be healthy. I see this that this time of year, your health is critical to your success. We've been reasonably healthy throughout this year and I feel that getting to this time of year and having your entire roster intact is critical, and we've done that so for us that was step one. Step two for all teams going into March is playing good basketball. I think we're playing solid and I feel good about the progress of our team. We are a very young basketball team, we've been depending on sophomores to really lead us to victories and they've been doing an awesome job of doing that. Honestly, Brittney Sykes and Brianna Butler are our two sophomores playing vital roles and just winning basketball games. Rachel Coffey is doing a tremendous job for us at the point guard; our turnover ratio has been the best it's ever been in school history. Obviously taking care of the ball is important, and Shakeya Leary who's our post player and our other starting senior has been doing an awesome job of making plays in the paint. We talked about finishing the season hard and finishing the season well and we won four of our last five games, which is really good for us. I'm really happy about where we are and I'm hoping we can just stay healthy and continue and play solid basketball."

How do you feel the depth of the team has developed, how have you seen the players develop throughout the season?

"They've had to develop because we were very honest with them, telling that we need them to win. They've stepped up and taken on the role of being able to come off the bench and provide scoring. I talk about our bench a lot, we need 20-25 points a night at least off of our bench. They've been doing that night in and night out. Taylor Ford's been coming in and Cornelia Fondren have been coming off the bench and doing a great job for us so they filled a great void that we had."

Can you talk a little bit about making the transition into a new conference and how that has met or exceeded the challenges you anticipated?

"Going into this conference you know you're going from BCS conference to BCS conference. You know it's going to be tough competition. It's exceeded by far, it's a very tough conference and I think that top to bottom is not a parody, I honestly know that this year they're a very good basketball team. I think that you can look at our entire conference as a whole and the teams that aren't doing particularly well right now are very competitive, they're in every game, they have a chance of winning those games and it's not about the parody in our conference. I believe that the best conference in the country by far if you go from top to bottom would be the teams that would probably be left out of the tournament in our conference and they probably should be in the tournament but it's just one of those things that unfortunately how it is. I've been there before, been left out when I probably should have been in, but from top to bottom it's a very strong conference."

What's the one aspect of your team's play that you think will determine just how far you make a run in Greensboro?

"Making shots for us. Obviously, being a zone team, you're going to give up some shots, probably other teams wouldn't get in a pressure man-to-man situation. I think that we have to match our opponent's threes and we can't come out to a team with nine threes on us and we had four. So we always talk about matching our opponent's threes, we can't be more than minus six from the three point line, meaning minus six points that is. We have to make shots, I think our defense has always been solid. We have to take care of the ball so as far as getting more shots so that's important."

Are you surprised at all that Notre Dame was able to go 16-0 in the conference?

"No, I'm not really surprised. They're a very good basketball team, I felt coming into this year. Obviously last year, it was Skylar Diggins and I felt people really talked about Skylar the entire season, which they should because she's a phenomenal player and still doing a great job in the league. I thought this year they would be more dangerous and being with them in a conference for the last seven years, I assumed they would be more dangerous because I knew they would have more balance. That's the difference right now is their balance. I thought last year sometimes, we would call it Skylar watch, and it's kind of like she would have the ball and they would just watch. This year they can't do that, they had to all get involved, so I knew that they would be more dangerous. I'm not even surprised at them for what they've done but we have Duke, North Carolina, who's playing really well. You can go top to bottom I think on any night and be beat in our conference but they're a very good team."

Syracuse University Athletics

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