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A blog on UConn women's basketball.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

West Virginia: A look back

Perhaps the most intriguing part of Saturday night inside the WVU Coliseum was the emotional tirade West Virginia coach Mike Carey was giving to his Mountaineers behind closed doors.

I made my way down to the interview room after UConn's 85-55 win and I could hear Carey just ripping into his team.

He wasn't in a better frame of mind a few minutes later when he attended the post-game press conference. A local reporter opened the interview session asking Carey about "moral victories." Oops. Not the best way to start the question and answer session off with a riled up coach. I began taping Carey as he responded to the initial question and shut off my tape recorder when he left the room. Let the record show that I had exactly 1 minute and 12 seconds of tape on Carey. With some cleaning up of the language, here are the highlights from Carey.

"I am so tired of the (stuff) that is going on. You all got beat by 30, I don't give a (rip) if you get beat by one or 30. These two seniors are not going to play. I will play the freshmen and sophomores. I don't give a (rip) if I get down to five players, I am tired of it.

"I know I am frustrated right now but I told them in the locker room, this stuff is going to change. We are going to start doing things the right way and play hard or they are going to get the hell out of the way. We let that team do stuff we hadn't let any team this whole year do. They were driving from the corner, from the top of the key and getting layups. I don't know where our weakside help was, what we were doing or what."

I asked West Virginia's Liz Repella what she thought the next practice would be like considering the frustration her coach expressed. Repella took a couple seconds and admitted that she was glad there was no practice planned for Sunday.

Before the game, I spoke with first-year West Virginia assistant coach George Porcha who I covered when he was a defensive back on a pair of NCAA tournament football team at the University of New Haven in the early to mid 1990s. We were underneath the basket UConn was shooting at during pre-game warmups. Porcha was spotted by UConn's Kaili McLaren who played for Porcha for the highly-successful Boo Williams AAU tournament. McLaren didn't know Porcha took the job at West Virginia and gave him some good-natured ribbing about his inability to drop her a text message or e-mail.

Porcha has fond memories of the one year he coached McLaren.

"Just how popular she is. I told her when her playing days are over, she could end up being th governor of Maryland or something like that. On the court, it is just her basketball IQ for being that size. Just her skill, her passing and she keeps all of her teammates up. You spend so much time together, all of July together and you never have a dull moment with Kaili around."

Now switching gears to UConn since this is a UConn blog after all.

Renee Montgomery, the only West Virginia native in UConn history, had quite the sizeable rooting section on hand and she gave them plenty to cheer about. Montgomery had 28 points, two shy of her career high set earlier this season against Oklahoma. She had an open 3 which would have given her the career high but was off the mark and her layup attempt on the next possession was blocked.

Maya Moore had another solid effort with 16 points and 10 rebounds and Tiffany Hayes continued her strong play with 10 points. Auriemma limited starters Caroline Doty and Tina Charles to 19 and 14 minutes respectively and I inquired about the reasons for leaving them on the bench for more than half the game.

"There was no one out there that she (Charles) could match up with and I don't know that she took advantage of some of the situations that she had. I thought Kaili would be much more difficult to play against. Tiffany, I just felt like defensively and in some other areas I thought she matched up better than Caroline did."

A few statistical notes, Montgomery passed Swin Cash to move into 10th on UConn's career scoring list while Charles moved into the No. 25 spot on the Huskies' career scoring list.

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