Ann Strother Good Quotations

Shots weren't falling. I felt like we had a lot of good looks and we couldn't get them to go down. It wasn't easy, and we made it harder on ourselves than we needed to. Defensively, we've been pretty consistent all year. It's something we could always rely on. Offensively, we have work to do.

She?s definitely frustrated about not being able to play as many minutes in practice and in games as she would like to, but I think she?s handling it really well. As long as she just stays positive, like she is, and does as much as she can, that?s all we can ask for. Right now, we?re just going by how she feels day to day and hoping that her knee feels good for the end of the year.

I think this is a good win for us, but there's always something you can take from it. Obviously, tonight being up 19 and then letting them kind of come back and then having it down to the wire the last few minutes is something that we need to work on. And we need to develop some maturity if we want to be as good as we can be in the (NCAA) tournament.

It feels really good to have this opportunity right now. But we still have things we want to get done. We're not just happy making it to the Elite Eight. That's not going to be a successful season if we end there. So I think we're taking that as an opportunity and we're ready to continue to build on it.

I think that's what makes it so frustrating. You look at a game like tonight and you see how good we can look and then you say the only reason we lost tonight is because we beat ourselves. We let another team come back into it and we mentally kind of got shaken. I think that's something that's going to be the biggest thing going into the (Big East and NCAA) tournaments.

I think we definitely have some things that we need to prove to ourselves, not to anybody else. That's obvious. Right now I feel like everyone's in a really good place and ready to go into postseason play.

That?s the one thing that Coach is really kind of harping on right now and frustrated with more than anything, the fact that we do get up and then let teams come back in. Then we force him to have a heart attack before we pull it out. I think it?s good to see (that we were able to close the deal Sunday); it?s a good win for us, but that?s something that we still need to work on.

We want it. In the Stanford game last year, I was horrible, and I think we all played pretty bad. That is something we are determined not to let happen again, and I think we are good enough when we are focused not to let it happen again.

It's tough because we've never played them before. All we need to know is they're a good team.

It's being more mature and not kind of playing street ball or throwing it around or being careless with it. That's a good sign.

Sometimes you're just going to have games like that for whatever reason. And just for us to be able to kind of push through it and tough it out, it's definitely a good sign. It's a sign of maturity for our team.

The meeting was significant. We were at a point in the season where we wanted the responsibility and needed to let coach know that, good or bad, we're making it our responsibility.