Paul Alepra Quotations

I have enjoyed coaching these girls the last three years. It has been fun watching them grow as basketball players. I am happy for them to be able to end the regular season with a win.

She is a pretty good free throw shooter. She went through a rough stretch when she wasn't shooting the ball well. But she practices it and she figured out what she was doing wrong. As long as she gets to the line those are free points and you have to get those and capitalize on that.

She has been doing that a lot lately. She plays up and harasses the other team's point guard. That makes the other team do something different with their offense. It spreads them out a little bit more and makes a little bit of a longer pass which we hope to pick off.

I give Princeville a lot of credit. Every time we would start to pull away they would come right back at us. They could have just as easily rolled over and died but they kept coming back.

Natalie is a bundle of energy. When she gets the ball in the post she is hard to defend.

We didn't shoot free throws well tonight but the girls did a nice job on the defensive end. I'm just happy with the win. It's a long trip over here and this was an important conference win against a good team.

Yesterday we worked on some things that we thought we needed to work on and we did those things better tonight. We moved the ball around well and we shot the ball better from the outside which opened up the inside.

We are worried about our next game only and not looking ahead. The girls wanted to set some goals at the start of the year, but I told them to just worry about our next game. They have adapted to that and our one goal is just taking care of the next game. We are not worried about two games away or three.

Each game they are getting better and better passing the ball. Those quick bounce passes to someone who is open when they are double-teamed or finding someone when they cut backdoor shows they are really seeing the floor.

We did a good job of getting the ball up the floor and almost everyone that played scored. Everyone got to play and this was one of those games you like as far as that goes.

Defensively we were strong again along with our rebounding. We knew they would put up some shots and we had to go get the ball to not allow them those second chance opportunities.

Our defense tightened up in the second quarter. We made it hard for them to get what they wanted and that helped us.

Those 3s by Sarah and Brooke were big. We also changed defenses in the second quarter and I think that helped a lot. Overall I was happy that the girls didn't get down mentally when Morrison built the early lead. We stayed with it, fought back and finished the first half strong.

This is a big relief. We were expected to come in and win this regional and the girls really responded. Kayla came out and broke the ice with that three and we never looked back. I couldn't be happier for the girls.

I'm happy for the girls. They wanted to defend what they won the year before and they did.

The best thing about her is that she is very consistent. You know what she is going to give you every night and if she is inconsistent then she errors on the side of good instead of bad. She doesn't show any emotion, she just goes out and does her job.

It helps us in the fact that they don't look past anybody.

Hopefully the girls can keep shooting well from the outside. If we do then that will help us a lot.

I don't know if it was our first game after a long break or what, but we just didn't play well in the first half.

It was nice to jump out and get a big lead like we did. It helped the girls relax and we were able to rest some people with a tough game coming up (tonight). I didn't want to wear them out and be sluggish on Thursday. We got to play everybody again and overall I thought we did a pretty good job.

The girls kind of got in a hurry at the end of the first half, which was what they wanted us to do. We talked at the half about just playing our game and in the third quarter we did. Marla hit a couple of big shots and we settled back down.

For a while we really moved the ball well and found the open person and those girls knocked down the shots.

I told the girls to relax and take good shots once we had a lead. I think maybe we relaxed too much and quit attacking the basket.

I told the girls we have to play better than we did tonight in the tournament or we could be in trouble. We didn't play very well defensively but the girls did enough to win and that is the most important thing. Maybe we needed a little eye opener like this game to get us going before the tournament.