Colorado University Athletics
Press Conference Quotes
Colorado Athletic Director Rick George
General
“First I’d like to say thank you for everybody being here this afternoon on such short notice. I do want to thank [Senior Associate AD/Internal Operations/SWA] Ceal Barry for helping with this search and Eastman & Beaudine [staffing and recruiting]. Bob Beaudine was very active in this and Chris Pert, who’s with our facilities, who introduced us to JR and helped set up our first meeting. It’s going to be my privilege to introduce just our eighth head women’s basketball coach. JR Payne has played and coached this game at a very high level and has achieved a lot in her short career. As a player at St. Mary’s she earned four letters and helped her team to a 26-7 record and the school’s first ever trip to the NCAA Tournament. As a coach, she’s been involved in rebuilding efforts every place that she’s been and she’s done an amazing job at each of the institutions she’s served. Her first head coaching position was at Southern Utah. She did a fantastic job there. She went to Santa Clara, and just in her second year had a record of 23-9, and went to the postseason this year for the first time in 10 years. So every place that she’s started and finished, she’s helped rebuild the program and got to a point where they’ve achieved great things in her last year. We’re excited she’s here. Her athletic accomplishments are great, but what I’ve learned about JR in the short time that we’ve had the opportunity to meet her, she’s got great character and high integrity. She’s a terrific person, a great mother and wife that I’ve learned. We’re really privileged that she’s going to be our next head coach.”
On What Led Them To Hiring Coach Payne
“As you know, we hired a search firm that helped us with a pool of candidates and we had a short list already in mind and we paired those two lists up. I actually got to meet with JR when we arrived in Las Vegas for the first time for the men’s basketball tournament. She happened to be on her way out which was unfortunate because it wasn’t the championship game, but she was gracious enough to stick around for a little while to meet with myself and Lance Carl. So, we met that day and there was some time in between then and then we met last week and we came to a decision late last week.”
Head Coach JR Payne
General
“Thank you so much everyone for being here. First I’d like to say a few thank yous. Thank you to Chancellor Phil [DiStefano] who I just got to meet and have lunch with and to Rick [George] and Ceal [Barry] who have spent a lot of time with me over the last several weeks. Thank you for this incredible opportunity to be your next women’s basketball coach. I’m excited to be at the University of Colorado. I’m excited to coach this women’s basketball team. I would also like to thank the players and staff at Santa Clara University where I just came from, where we accomplished so much in just a short two year period. I feel very blessed for the time that I spent there and very blessed to work with such a group of remarkable young women there. I’ll thank my family, Coach T, who always pushes me to be the best coach I can be both on and off the court. We have three amazing daughters who are already the biggest Buff fans. They’re looking at gear online and ready to come and meet the team and just thrilled to be a part of this Buff family. One other person I’d like to thank is probably one of my biggest supporters and mentors, Kelly Graves, who is the head women’s basketball coach at Oregon. He was my college coach and has really spent a lot of time with me over the years in helping me understand not just the game of basketball, but what it takes to build and maintain a championship program, while maintaining a great balance with your family life. He’s taught me that you really can have the best of both worlds so I really appreciate the time that he’s spent with me.
“What an exciting opportunity to be here in the Buff family. As I think about this department, this university, this program, there’s so many feelings that go along with something like this and the overwhelming feeling and thought is excitement. I’m excited to work with this team that we have here. I’m excited to work with the administration here at CU. I’m excited to build on the incredible tradition. I look at Ceal and think of the incredible tradition that is Buffs women’s basketball. There’s not that many teams in the country that have such excellence in their history so I'm thrilled to be able to work to rebuild a championship caliber team at Colorado. We met the team this morning. We had heard a lot of great things about them. Whenever you’re looking somewhere you do your research and you talk to coaches and different people and overwhelmingly people said this is a fabulous group of young women that you’re inheriting. We met them this morning and spent about an hour and half with them, talking and going back and forth, ‘What does practice look like?’ and all this stuff. We had a great time with them. I think there’s a lot of potential in that room and we talked about that. For us, we all know Lauren [Huggins] can shoot the lights out, we all know Kennedy [Leonard] is fabulous in transition, we know those basketball things about them. What we’re most excited about is the opportunity to get to know them as people, learn about their families, where you’re from, what do you like. I told them this morning, “I want to know all your pet peeves” or just whatever makes them tick. We’re excited for that moving forward. I would tell the team, I told them this morning, we’re going to work together, we’re going to work hard, and we’re going to have fun. I think our teams have always been really tough, really fearless teams, but we always have a lot of fun in what we do and in the way that we play. Moving forward, everything that our program will be about will be about building Colorado women’s basketball into a championship program. That will be our philosophy moving forward and we’re excited to be here. I’m really, really honored and humbled to be here. Thank you all for coming today.”
On Her Style Of Play
“I would sum it up in two words and it’s going to be blue-collar. We always talk about being the toughest team, being the hardest working team, and being extremely disciplined in everything that we do and to summarize that, it’s blue-collar top to bottom. Our staff is blue-collar. We believe in outworking our opponents from a recruiting standpoint from a scouting standpoint and our team will follow suit in that regard.”
On The Measure Of Success
“There’s so many different ways you can gauge success. For us, we love the basketball part of what we do. What we’re most passionate about is the opportunity to work with the young women that come into your program as 18 or 19-year-old students and watching them leave your program as women who are capable of taking on the world. I’m proud of the fact that our student athletes graduate and leave us as confident women, ready to take things on and be successful.”
On Coming To The Pac-12
“Colorado presents a unique opportunity to have truly world class academics with world class athletics, and I think that combination is something that’s very special and something that we can really recruit the best and brightest in the world really. That opportunity, to be able to have that was something that was exciting, and just the challenge of it. I talked about the history of our program as something that’s very unique and the challenge of rebuilding to that level of expectation and excellence is pretty fun.”
On Making An Impression On Her Players
“In our program, everything we operate on is based on relationship. The family atmosphere that we provide for our students and that we genuinely want from our student athletes is really important to us. It goes back to what I said previously, we want them to be ready and be great basketball players, no question, and great in the weight room, great in the classroom, all those things are great, but what we’re really preparing them for is life so they can deal with adversity later. They can be a great wife, a great mother, a great entrepreneur, whatever that may be. That’s always the foundation.”
On Assembling Her Staff
“We’re still in the recruiting process. Coach T will be our associate head coach. We’ve been coaching together for – gosh how many years? We’d have to do the math – 15 years, maybe. Coach T will be our defensive coordinator, I really work the offense, he really works the defense. We’re in the process, hopefully soon we will be able to announce the rest of our staff, but we’re recruiting some really talented people.”
On If Any Of The Previous CU Assistant Coaches Will Be On Her Staff
“We have talked about being able to visit with those people but we just aren’t here (in Boulder) for long enough right now. But we would like to visit with people that are here and see what everyone’s opportunities look like from there.”
On Using Her Past Experiences To Help Turnaround The CU Program
“We have been really fortunate. I think starting at Gonzaga as an assistant coach where we hadn’t been out of last place in nine years and able to turn that program. And then at Boise State as assistants and then the last two places we’ve been. The biggest thing for us is creating a culture that fosters and has our players striving for excellence. I know that’s a little bit of a catch-phrase, but we really believe it. We push them to be the best they can be in everything that they’re doing. That’s not always comfortable for players to really challenge their weaknesses and attack their weaknesses, but we work towards that. So really creating that level of striving to be the best that you can be. Those three things we hang our hat on are things that we’ve done in every single program we’ve been a part of. Being the toughest, being the hardest worker, being disciplined and those things translate into success. We lineup against a great team on the other side of the floor, but we go into that game knowing that they may be taller than us, they may be a little bit more talented in some areas, but if we know we will win every loose ball, we will be tougher, we will win the battle of the boards and things like that, those are things that I can translate to success and turning programs around. And it will be no different here, and we’ve already talked to our team about it. These are the three things we will be and I think they were excited about that, knowing, ‘Alright at least I know what that looks like and what’s expected of us.”
On If She Likes The Timing Of Her Hiring Based On Recruiting
“The timing is great. The timing for any transition and any change is just that, it’s a change so everyone has to adjust. But the timing is great that we were able to do this before the (recruiting) contact period ends. We will go out and try to see some great young women over the three or four days before that contact period ends. We have two evaluation periods in April coming up, so we’ll be able to get out and see as many players as we can during those two evaluation periods and then we’ll still have a month left of school and we’ll get to work with our athletes here. That’s really the biggest thing, we want to roll up our sleeves and get to work right now. If we could do individual workouts and kick off the heels and go, I would do it. But we have plenty of time for everything.”
On What It’s Like Having Her Spouse On The Staff
“Everyone asks us that question and they think it’s funny and how does it work, but honestly half of the people we work with don’t even know we’re married. We were talking about it earlier and the recruits that we’ve signed sometimes they get to campus and they kind of put it together and go, ‘Oh wait, you guys are’ – we’re very much business (oriented), we’re very much about basketball, we’re very much about our own individual relationships with our players so yeah it’s actually a total non-issue. But we do have a lot of fun. And you’ll see very quickly, I’m really more of the mellow one and I never get too high or too low. Coach T is out there he’s chest-bumping people and he’s fired up. So we’re kind of the yin and the yang on the staff.”
On Where Her Staff Will Focus Its Recruiting
“Recruiting over the last five, six years to a decade has really become global. For example, coach T is leaving the country tonight to go scouring the world for certain players that we’re looking for. But I would say Colorado is in a prime place, one: because we have fabulous girls basketball in the state of Colorado and then we’re surrounded by states that have fabulous girls basketball. Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Kansas, you just kind of go around us and it’s really a hotbed of talent. The Midwest has been really good for the University of Colorado for years. So we won’t be limited to any certain area of the country, but truly seeking out the best fits for our family here.”
On Who Influenced Her Into Getting Into Basketball
“I grew up in North Vancouver, British Columbia, went to a small school where we kind of did everything – back then you didn’t specialize. I played baseball with the boys when I was a little girl, I played soccer, volleyball, I did ballet; I kind of did a little bit of everything. Basketball was my true love starting about my sophomore year (of high school). My dad was always big into basketball, some of them would always shoot with me and encourage me in that way. Then honestly, my junior year of college when Kelly Graves came in and took over our program I really kind of fell in love with basketball again to a level where I thought I could do this for the rest of my life. At the time I didn’t realize that would be coaching, but a lot of different people have (influenced her).”
On Which Players She Is Excited To Work With At CU
“Honestly, I’m excited to work with all of them. We get online and watch film and figure out who can do what and who fits the style we like to play. Obviously, to have a fabulous, young point guard in Kennedy [Leonard] is very special. She fits the style we would like to play, we like to be very up-tempo offensively and I think that fits naturally to her skill set. I could go through the roster and tell you the strengths and things that I think are special about each player, but it would take too long. But I think that we have pieces of everything that we need. We’re just looking to build on that and put them all together and capitalize on each person’s strengths and I think we have a lot of potential in that locker room.”