Connie Allen Second Quotations

My girls never gave up. We were down by 16 at halftime and we lose by 18. We lost the second half by two points against a very good team. I'm very proud of how they played.

I was very impressed with our second half. We played a 2-3 zone, but we didn't box out well so we have to work on that. But I was very pleased. We took care of the basketball. Morgan Reeves played a tremendous game. She sparks our defense. She did a great job doing that. She took a charge from (Heath's) Maggie Combs and was in her face the whole game. She was able to rattle Heath a little bit.

I was very proud of her in the second half. You could see her getting ready to go for the basketball, and it would have been an over-the-back call and she backed off. That's a good thing, to see them taking what you tell them and going out and doing it, especially going into the tournament. We're going to need her to stay out of foul trouble.

I was happy the first half. The second half was a letdown that I usually don't see with this team, so that has me concerned.

We didn't show up to play until the second half, and when you're down by 19 it's hard to fight back.

We usually start off slowly. We usually play better in the second half, but we just played well in the second quarter and they really struggled shooting the ball. Obviously, that made things easier for us. We didn't change anything. We went with our game plan. We just did a better job executing.

It was the same thing (as in a 66-55 loss to Utica on Jan. 13). They started out on fire, and I don't know if we shut them down or if they got cold in the second half. The same thing happened this time, but we just didn't get the offensive scores we needed and we had some girls in foul trouble.

They were down and they knew they had to play better defense. We didn't play defense in the first half, and we knew we needed to in the second half to make it a ballgame. If we would have done that in the first half, we would have been fine.

They weren't on in the first half and they were in the second half. I think a lot of it came down to rebounding. We let them get too many offensive rebounds. They weren't making a lot of their first shots. It was their second and third shots.

The first game was pretty ugly for both teams, but now it's two totally different teams. Often this year we've saved our best ball for the second half, and (Monday) we can't do that.