University of Minnesota Athletics
Minnesota-Northern Arizona Postgame Quotes
12/23/2010 12:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
Postgame Quotes
Minnesota 82, Northern Arizona 74
December 22, 2010
Minneapolis, Minn.
Head Coach Pam Borton
Opening statement:
“I was really proud of our team for really gutting this win out coming off of exams when your players are emotionally drained, thinking about going home for Christmas. [Katie] Loberg had an exam probably three hours before our game tonight. So I’m really proud of our players for really showing up and really gutting out this win. Obviously there are a lot of things we need to work on and figure out before we go into the Big Ten, but I was really proud that we found a way to win this basketball game tonight.”
On setting the new Minnesota record for coaching victories at 173:
“I think when the season’s over I’ll have a chance to enjoy it. It’s probably the furthest thing from my mind. I’d love to win every game that we play…All the wins mean I’ve coached a lot of great players. You can’t win basketball games unless you have great players. And I’ve had great staff members on my staff over the last eight, nine years. They’ve all been part of that, and every player that I’ve been able to coach. All the credit goes to the players I’ve coached here.”
Minnesota Player Quotes
Katie Loberg
On what it meant to have a strong performance tonight after battling injuries this season:
“Obviously it felt good to get back in, but if my teammates weren’t seeing me and giving me the passes…It’s really them I owe the credit to because they’re the ones passing me the ball. It’s just fun when we can play together and get the ball inside.”
Kristen Dockery
On her first career double-double:
“Like Katie said, my teammates got me the ball and put me in great positions to score. So I just took advantage of those two-point shots, and rebounding is something I need to do for this team, so I just tried to really focus on that.”
Northern Arizona Head Coach Laurie Kelly
Opening statement:
“It was a good game. I’m proud of the way we played, and we played really hard. It just came down to in crunch time not getting the defensive stops we needed. You aren’t going to win many games letting them shoot over 50 percent.”
On her strategy for the game:
“Their strength is their size. The way to counter that is we took our smaller, more athletic kids and tried to spread the floor and get some things driving to the basket. It hurt us sometimes with their inside scoring. On the other end sometimes she [Borton] had to make some lineup changes and go with a more athletic lineup not playing two bigs as much.”
