March 22, 2005

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - DePaul Postgame Quotes vs. Liberty
Head Coach Doug Bruno
Opening Statement: The Liberty players did a great job this evening. They deserved the credit and they deserve to go to Chattanooga. That said, the two young women sitting next to me, specifically Jenni Dant, have been just magnificent for our program. We wouldn't be sitting here today if it weren't for them. It's not ever pleasant to have to go home early. If there's any consolation, it's knowing that they both left it on the floor this evening.

On Jenni Dant: That's why she's a champ. The first words out of her mouth are what she didn't do. The fact is that she did what she could tonight to help to help us go on as did Khara.

On playing with Katie Feenstra on the bench in the first half: When you're a running team you have to know when to attack and when to hold back. We try to get the players to understand that you can't put a square peg in a round hole. It's not there, you've got to step back and you've got to be able to execute in the half court and we have the ability to execute in the half court, we just didn't in the first half. We were trying to go down to Khara when Feenstra was out of the game, and a couple of them just went ahead and shot a three. We like shooting threes. At the same time, you've got a 60 percent shooter under the basket, and when their big gun is off the floor you've got to go inside, and that was a very critical point of the basketball game. I thought we were going to be able to make a little bit of a play in the second half.

On the full court press: We are not deep enough to be able to press full court all the time. We knew we had some half court pressing packages, which we didn't want to use before halftime because we knew their coach would make an adjustment. We waited until after halftime, and it got us the lead back.

On playing back from being down: One of the psychological aspects of basketball is when you play back from a deficit. The human nature tendency is to relax. You've climbed out and you want to sit down and relax. We specifically addressed that issue during a timeout and went back on the floor to execute a specific offensive set when I really thought that we had them on the ropes, and at that critical moment our players went back on the floor playing one on one basketball. I allow my players the freedom to go one on one, at the same time we do have a system that we can use to exploit people, and we didn't use it. That was the second critical moment. The two critical points were where we didn't exploit Katie Feenstra being off the bench, and not knowing when to run in the second half.

Senior Guard Jenni Dant
On DePaul's play: I think that we weren't finishing, specifically I wasn't finishing, because I was a little too aggressive, I was too fast. This game is a game of pacing. Throughout the whole game you have to know when to go and know when to slow down. I think I was too aggressive, too eager. A lot of those shots were a little too hard. I think there was a couple of decisive periods in the game. A couple of times we had fast breaks and I didn't get the ball where I needed to get it.

Junior Forward Khara Smith
On playing with Feenstra out: I think that was very critical but I don't think that we took good enough advantage of what we had when she was out of the game. In the second half we had a lot of chances when we went on fast breaks we had a chance of keeping that going but we didn't.