Nov. 15, 2009
Recap | Box Score | Photo Gallery 1 
| Photo Gallery 2 Head Coach Lisa Bluder
Opening statement…
I think we played a great opponent tonight. Illinois State is extremely disciplined, they’re well coached, and they just don’t make a lot of mistakes. I’m really proud of our players for this win; I think this is a great victory for us. We’ve been through a lot of adversity this week, and to be able to come in and play back to back games and have our players play that many minutes and have them respond. It shows you how much character these women have to be able to hold their head up high when we’ve lost four players in the matter of a one week time, is tough for any team to handle. To do that and beat a quality team like Illinois State really says something about the women we have on our team. I think Kamille Wahlin lead this team extremely well tonight, she hit some important buckets for us in the stretch. Kachine, what do you say about Kachine? If people don’t want to come and watch her play they’re just silly. They are missing an opportunity to see a player that is so good at crashing and so good at keeping the ball alive and continuing to preserver. Jaime Printy, again her maturity showed out there she didn’t look like a freshman; she didn’t get nervous down the stretch. I thought that was very good. Kelly Krei hit four three pointers in the first half, that was tremendous. She took advantage of what they were giving her. This is the first time Morgan Johnson went against a post of that size and she didn’t back down. I am very proud of this team and happy for the win.
After Morgan got two fouls early in first half…
You can look at the bench and see that we don’t have a lot of opportunities to go to. It’s not what we want to see happen, but Kelsey Cermak just goes in there, even though she is so undersized, and gave it everything she had. I am very thankful for that. We went into the zone and that helped us stay out of the foul trouble a little bit. The first half our zone was very effective, the second half it wasn’t as effective. Illinois State did a much better job attacking the zone the second half, but the first half I thought was pretty good.
Late second half switch back to man-to-man…
I thought we intensified at that point. We were down five when we switched up our defenses. Our kids are just a lot more aggressive in that defensive style. When you’re down five with six minutes left to go, you have the day of tomorrow off and go just as hard as you can. Our kids did that.
Late second half defensive intensity…
We switched to man-to-man defense at that point. We were trying to stay out of foul trouble with the zone a little bit. When we switched to man, I thought that was good for us and we boxed out extremely well. They didn’t get a lot of second and third shot attempts against our player defense so we did a good job with that. I know we only out-rebounded them by four, but we had 22 offensive rebounds to their 11. That was a lot more opportunities for us to shoot the ball.
Double Bonus early in second half…
That was important for us because we only shot five free throws in the first half. The second half we got to double bonus early. That’s part of our scheme, we want to get to the rim but we’ll take the foul. We are very confident with our free throw shooters. That’s part of what we’re trying to accomplish with our offense.
#21, Kachine Alexander
Defensive Intensity…
We picked up our intensity on defense, and that was key. Boxing out and getting loose balls, being the first to hustle to plays. We got it into our head that we need to intensify our defense to make them a little nervous when they got the ball. I think that helped us a lot.
#2, Kamille Wahlin
Big Shots…
Sometime your shots drop and sometimes they don’t. Throughout the game I wasn’t in a particularly good rhythm. But when it comes down to the stretch you just have to put that behind you. When I got my feet set on the one three pointer, it felt good and it went in. Kachine had a good pass to me and your focus has to be on finishing the game and not what happened throughout the game.