Friday, Nov. 20, 2015 | Haas Pavilion | Berkeley, Calif.
Head Coach Lindsay Gottlieb
On the School Haas Rock atmosphere today
“I think it made a great impact on the several thousand kids that were here today. It's fun to remember that the platform we have is the most important thing that we do. It was a great day for Cal Women's Basketball.”
On today's performance
“UC Riverside is a good veteran team. John is one of my good friends, he's a terrific coach and his team is playing well. I thought all and all Riverside out played us today. They did them better than we did us. But I think our girls played tough to get the win. I am proud of us for that. I thought people made some good plays, but they caused us a lot of problems and we definitely came out a bit sluggish. We found a way in the second half so we will take it and move on. But it's a good lesson for our team that we need to find our intensity level every single time we step on the floor and our opponents are good, particularly this one.”
Junior Forward Courtney Range
On what School Haas Rock means to her
“I'm so happy to be here. I love it, I love kids and so I tried to spend as much time as I could out there before I came in here. It's fun, the atmosphere is great and they are screaming and so happy to be here. This is probably one of the best days to play at Haas.”
Freshman Guard Asha Thomas
On her mentality stepping into the point guard role
“Coming in here, I had to be confident. Taking this role, I had to be confident. I have had the trust of my teammates and my coaches, and that really helps me be confident on the floor.”
On waking up for a morning basketball game
“I knew it was game day. I knew that it was many hours before I was used to, but when it's game time, you just have to turn it up and play.”
On what School Haas Rock means to her
“Like Coach G said, kids out here, especially locally, don't really get this chance. Coming from this area, it really made me not take things for granted. It was fun hearing all these kids…it was loud, but it was really fun.”
Head Coach John Margaritis
On third quarter
“I think you can look at the box score and say 'Wow, they lost 22-14 in the third quarter,' but if you examine it you see we really just lost the last few seconds. Cal made two late threes. It was 16-14 before that and then it's 22-14.”
On what strong showing means for the future
“It's a long season. Sometimes you have the tendency to play well against somebody because maybe you're up for that game and you play someone you were supposed to beat and you don't do it. So we still have a ways to go. But I think it's too early to say. I think for today's game, it was good for us. We've schedule five Pac-12 schools and the idea was you schedule tougher schools but you hope you learn something from the games and I think we can learn some things from this game. It wasn't a blowout where you go home and you don't even know where to start. Today we had an opportunity to compete and we came up short.”
On what you can take away from today's game
“I was telling the team after the game that when the game of this magnitude is this close everything gets magnified. With our ability to finish the half or the quarter strong or to finish the game strong, we can learn from it. We can look at the possessions. We can go back and look at film and the possessions and look at when the game was on the line what did we get and what did we choose to get. And then maybe you can learn from it the way you approach the next the game – the way you made shot selection, who you're going to go to, how hard you defend, how hard you play when you're tired. After we play Oregon State next we play five or six games later Oregon and Washington and maybe when we play them, Pac-12 round two, we can see if we've improved.”
On confidence of team
“I hope they feel good. And they should. Confidence is only as good as the next opponent, as long as you're not overconfident. What I would like if I could blink my eyes and get what I want, I'd like to go to practice and approach it in a different way, meaning every possession counts. If we could have executed a few more possessions maybe we could have won. So in practice our two hours and 15 minutes are serious and we work, but I'm talking about the level of concentration. If that level of concentration translates to practice then every possession we run on offense or defense should mean something.”
