Colorado-Villanova Quotes

Colorado Head Coach Kathy McConnell-Miller

General

“I think for the rest of the night and tomorrow people are going to ask me, “how did that happen?” The only thing that I can say is that Brittany Spears decided to play for the last three minutes. It was a very difficult game defensively. Villanova is very smart and they are great at reading. They know how people have guarded them all year and they are good at making adjustments. It took us 34 minutes to truly figure out what adjustments we needed. Jackie McFarland was key (in helping make the adjustments).”

“I think offensively we were efficient down the stretch and we took the best shots we could take. The combination of the score and the energy from the fans got us over the top.”

On Brittany Spears

“I think she is the type of player that takes on responsibility and likes to be part of the offensive scheme. She struggled a little bit to get good looks. They hugged up on her a little bit. She is no secret. She is good off-the-bounce and can shoot the three. Villanova was focused and took her out of the game. She got loose, got a look and hit the three and then she backed it up with another one. She is young and she is going to mature in the game and be there on the defensive end and become a more balanced player. Her energy was generated through her offense. When she hit that shot, it opened it up for her.”

On running out of time

“We were down 11 points and I looked up and thought they are such a difficult team to come back on. They take so much time on each possession. They do not care if they shoot the ball with one second left on the shot clock. They are going to hold it for the last shot and it is going to be a very low possession game. With that, I had some concerns they were going to run the clock. There was a serious concern there was not going to be enough time (to come back) because their style of play.”

Colorado Players

Fr. F Brittany Spears

GENERAL - “The last three minutes I played better, played better defensively, I made some big shots and that was the difference. It hit me that we were losing and we had to start conditioning.”

ON LATE-GAME THREE-POINTER- “It gave us the momentum and I felt that we were going to win the game.”

So. G Whitney Houston

GENERAL- “We never gave up and stuck together to the end. I've never seen a team that screened so much as Villanova and read plays like that. We won it together.”

ON JACKIE MCFARLAND- “She's our leader and we knew we had to get her the ball tonight. In one-on-one coverage we knew she had to get the ball.”

Sr. F Jackie McFarland

ON THE CROWD- “That was the best crowd by far I've ever played in front of at CU. Amazing.”

GENERAL- “My mindset was just find a way, find a way, find a way. If they were going to take away the block against us, I had to find another way to get open. If they put two or three people on me, we have great shooters with Spears and Smith and we'd be crazy not to get them the ball. I said before the game I had a good feeling about this game. The frustration was just that time was running down. I was just waiting for us to make a run and hoping it wouldn't come too late.”

ON BRITTANY SPEARS'S LATE-GAME THREE-POINTER- “As a team we really feed off of three-point shots and that energized us and gave us the momentum and let us break that seven-point lead.”

Villanova Head Coach Harry Perretta

General

“We have a young team and we made a lot of mistakes at the end of the game. We had a lot of defensive errors down the stretch, that's what happens when you are under the kind of pressure we were at the end. I thought that we panicked on offense in the second half and took too many bad shots. We were only making one or two passes instead of the five, six or seven we were making in the first half. Give credit to Colorado, they hung in there and stayed with it. That's what you have to do to make a comeback like that, stay with it.”