Post Game Quotes: Bowling Green

MSU Head Coach Suzy Merchant

Opening statement…
It was a good place to start. Bowling Green played extremely hard. Coach Robyn (Fralick) is getting things turned around there. You could see some of the stuff she did at Ashland, she carried forward to Bowling Green. We weren't really ready for that 2-1-2 buzz zone. We have zone offenses obviously, but we didn't really spend a lot of time working on that, so I thought that bothered us a little bit and just slowed us down. When we were in transition, we missed a couple of shots back-to-back there.

On Mardrekia Cook's performance…
Yeah obviously Mardrekia has been hurt coming off that ACL. Nia Hollie had her hamstring, she didn't play last game. Sidney Cooks is just starting to come back, it's good to see them all come back. Mardrekia can give us really good energy. Drek's biggest battle right now is just playing through the conditioning piece. She's two years without that because of her lower leg injury so she just needs to understand it's a process. I think the first two games she was really disappointed in herself, which she shouldn't have been because I thought she played really well. I thought tonight she did a better job of staying strong in short spurts and then coming out. Our assistants did a better job of saying, "hey, get her out, give her a rest" because when she gets tired, that's when things go downhill for her a little bit. But we just gotta keep her confidence up by maybe not playing her during longer stretches, just to keep her more effective for us.

On Bowling Green coming within 12, but then MSU went back up by 30…
That's their leadership. We talked about how you just can't get bored. They were making threes and they play with pace. They got the ball up quick, their senior point guard really got away from us a little bit there in that 3rd and 4th quarter. Our kids thought, "oh we're up by 30" and then 30 turns into 13. I think they went zone and we had to go zone there. So I thought people made some big plays and we did a better job of being in gaps and hanging in with their team in transition.

Players Mentioned

Mardrekia Cook

Sidney Cooks

Nia Hollie

Related Videos