Dec. 30, 2000
Santa Clara Head Coach Chris Denker
About the win
"It's huge. Any time you beat a team of their caliber, it means a lot. It also means a lot because we struggled the other day against Maryland. We just didn't play well. It was not indicative of how we want to play, nor how we need to play. The last two days we dedicated ourselves to doing just that. Finding our identity and I think we did that today. I think that people always say you have to learn from your losses. I think we're going to learn from this win, because of the way we prepared for the win, and went out and were able to accomplish it.
On playing without leading scorer Annie Garrison for most of the game, due to foul trouble
I was more concerned with the flow of the game. Were we going to have more people get four fouls. Otherwise, I have faith in a lot of our kids. Julie Butler stepped up and did great. Kendra Rhea stepped up and did a great job. We were able to tinker around with our lineup and find other ways to score. Our guard play--Becki Ashbaugh and Caroline Gruening--were just huge. They way they controlled the tempo, the way they ran our offense, they way they defended some very dangerous guards from Texas Tech. That ultimately is what it came down to.
Santa Clara Senior Forward Jen Glysson (16 points, 5 rebounds)
"This is definitely the biggest win of my career.
"Before the game we said we were just going to feed off each other's intensity and that's what we did. After the first, even more people started to step up for us."
About keeping the momentum
"There was never a point in the game where I thought we were going to lose. After the first half, we knew we could play with them. Even if we got down on them, we could come back on them. We all had confidence in each other and knew we could do it."
Santa Clara Junior Guard Becki Ashbaugh (17 points, 5 assists)
On her winning three-pointer with 0:39 left in game
"In the time out prior to that shot, Chris (Denker, head coach) said to the whole team, `don't think about it, if you have an open shot, just shoot it.' So, my defender was a little bit off me, so I just took it, hoped it went in and it did."
On the win
It was a big win for us because we haven't been playing well. But we've had a couple of really good practices the last couple of days. We wanted to come out and prove to ourselves what kind of team we are. In that sense, this win is big.
"It was important for us to get off to a good start. On Wednesday, against Maryland, we got down 10-0 right off the bat. One of our goals for tonight was to come out aggressive early. Jen Glysson was a big reason why that happened. She was awesome the first 10 minutes.
"They're a great team. We knew they were going to come back, and we just had to keep playing our game and answer back. We weren't down about losing the lead in the second half, we just knew we had to battle back."
Texas Tech Head Coach Marsha Sharp
"We deserved to lose. We didn't play well enough to win and I don't want to take anything away from Santa Clara because I thought they played really well. They had a great plan and their kids did a great job of executing on both ends of the floor. We really didn't play like we'll have to play to try and be a good basketball team. Hopefully it will be a wake-up call and we'll understand that we've do some things much better than we did today in order to win.
"We didn't execute offensively. We had our four leading scorers had one field goal and half time. That tells you we didn't shoot the basketball very well and didn't execute well enough to get good shots. That's a concern to me. I thought our post players didn't do a very good job early defending their post game. That really got us in a bind early, then their guards kind of took over after that. It was a total breakdown.
"If you're a top-10 team, you just have to hold those challenges off and we didn't have people step up today to do that."
Texas Tech Sophomore Forward Plenette Pierson (12 points, 4 rebounds)
We did have a total breakdown. We needed somebody to step up for us and we didn't have that tonight. We have to have that for the rest of our season and for years to come."
