Gary Gait Quotes
Syracuse Women’s Lacrosse
Head Coach Gary Gait
Syracuse vs. Notre Dame
April 11, 2009
Opening statement:
“It was a tale of two halves. That was an excellent game. Notre Dame is a very good team. We really weren’t ready to give up and they didn’t either. They went hard in the second half and some bounces went their way. We weren’t quite in sync and they made it a close game. I’m very proud of our team for hanging in there, sticking it out and finishing the game and handing the pressure. Sometimes when you’re up and you aren’t scoring on your possessions, you can just give up on. But at the end we made a key save. Liz got the ball and just killed the last 30 seconds. It was a great win and now we move on.”
On Notre Dame’s play in the second half:
“They have a couple of the top scorers in the country on their team. They’re very athletic and go hard to the net. We were a little bit spread out and if we weren’t getting there, we were getting the foul called against us. I thought we played okay against them. Certainly in the first half we did very well. We just have to prepare to play good positional defense and not t foul. We’re always going to continue to get better and those are two of the best players in the country and they did their job in the second half.”
On Liz Hogan’s final save:
“I have a lot of confidence in Liz. They scored a few there and I knew she was going to come up with a big save. She’s done it all year for us. You just have to believe in her and she stepped up and made that save. She made that play and gave us the opportunity to run the clock out so it was a job well done by her in the end.”
On what he said to the player in that final time out:
“Play with confidence. Look around, see what you have. You have two options, back to Liz and she can put it in the crease or going out there and pressing and lobbing it down the field and let us go after it. With 19 seconds those were the two options. We went back to Liz. Liz moved the ball. She couldn’t get back to her goal clean so we ran it out.”
On what he said to the team during the media time outs during Notre Dame’s scoring run:
“You just have to tell your players to mentally focus or refocus and go out there and relax and play with composure and play the game. You can’t stop playing and they didn’t. It didn’t go our way but they didn’t stop playing. We hit some pipes, missed some saves, missed some opportunities, but sometimes that’s the way the ball bounces."
On playing Cornell on Wednesday:
“It’s another opportunity. It’s certainly an Upstate New York rivalry game. We’ll bounce back and start preparing. We’ll take tomorrow off and rest a little and we’ll be right back at it Monday morning. We know Cornell is a very good team. They are ranked 20th in the country right now and they have something to prove. They’re going to come into the Dome and try and get the upset. But we’ll go back to our video and do our homework and get the players focused and prepared and have some more fun Wednesday night.”
