Syracuse head coach Felisha Legette-Jack met with the media to discuss the 82-69 road loss at NC State.
NOTE: Click the video player above to watch the full press conference!
Coach, in the long stretch towards the end of the game, where there's like five minutes left but a bunch of stoppages, what do you tell your players just to stay in it?
Keep fighting, keep moving, maybe too long, keep winning the small things. I thought we did a great job defensively. Probably a great player out there. Uche played 38 minutes. She was zero for zero from the free-throw line. And I think that we can look at that and see that that's an interesting stat.
What kind of sparked that second-half comeback, if you will? What was the team talking about in the locker room to get you guys back into it?
We were talking about you've got to believe you deserve this. Your time is right now. In the first half, I think that NC State is a great team. I remember how they were in the first four or six games of the season. They were killers. We knew that they were going to bring that. They lost two games in a row. We should have been more ready to understand the wrath of that resistance.
And we kind of kept getting punched in the mouth. Oh, my God. Yeah, they were punching us in the mouth, physically, but figuratively speaking. And we didn't match that until about halftime. We said, hey, we were better than this. And we responded accordingly. We won the second half.
Playing in an environment like this, how does that prepare your team for March?
It's an incredible atmosphere. Coach has done a tremendous job. This is a winning pedigree. You know from Kay Yow. It has been an incredible atmosphere. And our goal is to try to grow the dome to make it feel as personable as we can. We had about 5,000 fans at our last game. They had 5,500 today.
But it felt a lot different because it's such a close environment. And I think it's really amazing for a women's basketball game. And our goal is to continue to grow our fan base. I love what it looked like last game. I hope that on Senior Day, on March 1st, we bring the heat as we did previously. And I think that we'll percolate into something as special as this.
26 points from Uche's Izoje today. How much of a spark does she provide, kind of when you guys are struggling offensively, and you guys can kind of go to her to get things done?
She's a winner. She rises to the challenge. She's, in my opinion, the kid of the year. She is the kid who came here with the idea that she can be something significant under our tutelage. And she has walked into that situation time and time again. I'm so proud of her.
Her focus, her poise, and her ability to let things rub off her shoulder when she feels like she's been wronged. As a freshman, I think there should be some understanding or communication on why things are going on. But at the end of the day, she trusts the system. She's playing a game and is one of the best players, in my opinion, in the conference. Forget the fact that she's a freshman.
Switching from rugby to an older player in Dominique Darius. Just talk a little bit about her being the ball handler for this team.
Dominique is a warrior. Not because of basketball, but because of life lessons. I mean, she has gone through two different schools and really has been fighting with somebody to see her, to see me. Just know that I got some things. I might be a 17-, 18-year-old kid, and I might be coming at you in the wrong kind of way, but I just want you to see me. And I got her on my team, and I just said, all I'm going to do is see you. And she has come out, and she's talked, and she's come, and she's fighting, and she's argumentative.
But I listen to her, and what she has done after not playing for four years is nothing short of a miracle. I am so in awe of the leadership she's shown. Yeah, did she make mistakes? Did she take some bad shots? Yeah, that's human. But her fight and her stick-to-itiveness have been just amazing.
Our team has done so many incredible things throughout this. I think they picked us 13th in the conference, and right now we're homesteading at number four. And it's not about what people think, and I tell our players all the time, and Dominique understands that people thought certain things about me, and I became that.
What happens if I think certain things about myself, and I become that? And all I do is give her permission to be free, to become. And this team has shown up because Dom Darius has ignited us with her ability to know that permission has been granted for her to be free. Last question for Coach.
Coach, after defensively it wasn't great in that first quarter, you made that switch to that zone. What kind of went into that decision to switch in the zone, and how do you think it affected the way NC State ran their offense?
You can think that they were the best shooters ever, but they hit a couple of shots that made us believe that it may be percolating. And moving forward, I should have gone earlier than that. And they started driving our kids, started letting them kind of go into the lane a little bit.
When we played a little bit of perky jerky basketball, I just thought that we surrendered to that too much, and I think that's going to be what carries us moving forward. So, you guys that're here, please know that you have a great coach, a great team. We're very fortunate.
Our goal is to grow Syracuse in a way that we can have the same kind of excitement, enthusiasm, and purpose. I am in awe of how it's built here. Women's basketball matters in this area, and we're going to make it matter on the East Coast, too.
