Jay Sparks Quotes (18 Quotes)

That's obviously a significant reason why she's player of the year. She does those kind of things for her team. Give her a whole lot of credit.

You can't get down 18 and expect to win. I thought we battled hard in the second half, but we lost it in the first half. Everybody will agree with me there.

There were a few good performances out there, but, truthfully, there weren't enough of them. We will hopefully take what we learned in this game tonight and apply it toward getting better on Friday. We have to have some people step up and play the way they are capable of playing if we are going to be successful the rest of the year.

That's the reason why you play the tournament. We play those two games to get some of that rust out of our system, because after that we don't have anything but conference left.

We were trying to take it right to them, but we didn't do a very good job of that. We could throw it in there, but we didn't do a very good job of being aggressive once we got there.

The play was destroyed when Erica lost control of the ball, and she had to pitch it back. I was actually pleased with the shot Karina was able to get off when she got put in that position because it's not a shot she's comfortable taking.

We don't have the ability to concentrate for any amount of time. When you don't have that, you have games like we had tonight. If you look back over the season, we've had a lot of lulls like that.

I think what we hope what we're going to get from that game is individual confidence for our players, where they think they can contribute to our success. I think that right there is maybe the most important dynamic for our team at this point.

We broke down all our games and, minus two of them, we had a shot to win seven of them. This would be eight. I thought we had a shot to win, but in the second half we'd get one-shot-and-out and we couldn't answer them.

It was a total lack of focus, concentration and intensity. You add all that up and it equals 27 turnovers and a loss.

I think we've made nice progress, but it's going to be interesting to see if we lose any of the progress that we've made because of the long layoff. Nobody really knows. ... It's sort of like starting over. They just start over with a little bit more knowledge of what's going on.

The whole first half they wanted me to tell them what to do based on our set plays. Outside of maybe one possession in the second half, we didn't run a set play. We just played basketball, and I thought that was good for us.

As an athletic department staff member, he is so loyal and so committed -- not just to men's or women's basketball, but to the whole program. He's not been able to give to the whole athletic program like he would have liked to and so I think the most obvious change you'll see is his attention to some of the sports that he has not been able to really commit to.

Human nature says we can relax, that they aren't fully loaded. That relaxation is not a bad thing, but it kind of deteriorates the focus aspect of the game.

We've been on the wrong side of those a lot this year. It's nice to see we got one to bounce our way one time.

When you add it all up, we just didn't shoot a high percentage. That's the bottom line of this game. This is a tough lesson for us to learn, but our girls are being left open for a reason. They're not proving they can make shots.

I do feel like we got a good draw on the bracket, but it doesn't take away the fact that you still have to win four games in five days. Our team hasn't proven that they can play quite that consistently for that period of time. Of course, I'd love to see it.

I just don't think our girls, offensively, are playing with a whole lot of confidence, so it puts a burden on all of them and us as coaches to know who to throw it to that might make a shot.