Postgame Quotes: High Point at Virginia

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High Point at Virginia
Nov. 16, 2011
Postgame Quotes

Virginia Head Coach Joanne Boyle
On guard China Crosby:
“She’s fine, she just tweaked it and got scared because she’s had some issues before. But they tested her and she’s walking on it so it looks like she just strained it or pulled it. But she looks good.

“You know she is just a fireball. I think she just gets upset because she is finally back healthy, playing well, being a leader out there on this team and she just wants to be a part of that. I think just any time it feels like there is going to be a setback it feels like ‘oh no here we go again’. If anything I think she just feels a little bit more scared.”

On playing zone defense:
“It is so outside my comfort zone but you want to put your team in a position to be successful and we’re buying into this right now. We’re going to keep working on it and there will be a time obviously where we’ll play some (man-to-man). We’re a short bench and we’re being aggressive in the zone. It’s not like we’re not being aggressive so we’re just trying to change some things up.”

On playing three games in five days:
“It’s a lot and we just had to plug this game in where we could find room. I’m not going to make an excuse for our team because I don’t think we played up to what we have been playing. Sometimes it is good to get tested this early but we get a day off tomorrow and we get two really good prep days for Tennessee. I told them we can’t be this team on Sunday, we have to come in with a different mindset.

On Tennessee:
“We took a punch tonight and we have to throw a punch on Sunday. I don’t mean that literally, I’m just saying we have to come out more prepared and we have to be physical. I don’t think we played physical tonight and I don’t think we boarded well early. We got pushed around and that created us to be tentative out there. I don’t want to be a tentative team so we’re going to have to rebound the basketball and play physical against them, really move the ball around, change them up, and we have to take care of the ball. Slow them down, they’re a good team, they’re a fast team, a great team.”

Senior Guard Ariana Moorer
On the game tonight:
“I just calmed down like coach has been telling me. Taking the shots whenever they were open instead of forcing them.”

Sophomore Forward Jazmin Pitts
On the Tennessee game:
“We’ve had to take it one game at a time and now we can look forward to that game and start preparing for it.”

High Point Head Coach Jennifer Hoover
On the emotion of returning to Virginia:
“It has been a lot of fun coming back in. The hospitality is just unbelievable. It was so much fun when I was here to be a part of the tradition of the University of Virginia. Obviously JPJ is an amazing arena so it’s fun for me and my kids to come play in this type of atmosphere. I had hoped we’d compete a little bit better but that’s just one of those things where you have to chalk it up and move forward. We play another game on Friday night.”

On High Point’s start:
“I thought we started well and I thought that one of the biggest keys for them was when [Jazmin] Pitts came off the bench. She has been such a spark plug for them. We talked a lot about it and I thought we had a hard time matching that kind of physicality and that kind of intensity. She was able to change the game in a way that hurt us.”

On rebounding:
“We talked a lot about rebounding – even at halftime when we were tied on the boards – but then we lost by 17 on the boards. That’s not what we’re about so that’s something that we have to address and that we have to fix and we have to fix it fast.”

On Virginia:
“One thing that stands out is that they have so many weapons on their team. Obviously, one of the things that’s really going for them, is that their zone defense is giving everybody a fit. They’re huge so that zone is really working. We watched two of their games and said ‘they’ve played 80 minutes of zone.’ Now you can say that they’ve played 120 minutes of it because they still haven’t played a possession of man-to-man. You have to be able to attack it and unfortunately our shooter wasn’t hitting tonight initially. When Erin Reynolds hit that first three early I thought that that might give her a little spark but we ended up having a lot of problems on the perimeter.”