Jim Foster Quotations

We stopped being a sieve on the glass. We started to take responsibility for boxing out.

When we got down eight, we ratcheted it up and went to another level.

We know what happened the first 10 minutes, and we know what happened the last 30. I try to focus on the 30 because that's what makes us a good basketball team.

She wants to get better. You walk into our gym before practice starts, you'll always find Jess at a basket working on her strengths and weaknesses. She starts every day with a routine that allows her to maintain her excellence.

She's a terrific player. Any time a player produces 26 points on 14 shots, that's a great game. . . . She was going to have to beat five people tonight, not just one person.

She's a terrific jump shooter and plays within herself. I think she's a player who probably is the reason this team wins a lot of games.

She's an old-fashioned basketball player. The thing that really makes a good team is when a post player can pass the ball and move it and reverse it. Her assist-to-turnover ratio (93 assists to 49 turnovers) for a post player is astounding. It's like nothing I've ever seen.

I'd like to see that every game. I thought we executed well, took care of the ball and went after it on defense. We really played hard on the defensive end.

He's been very good for the league in some ways. But he's been a problem at times.

Kim is a real force coming into the game as a change of pace player. We've got a lot of players who can come off the bench with energy.

I thought we played terrific defense and well enough offensively. I think we can play a little better offensively but defensively, except for a few mistakes on the perimeter, we were solid.

I thought our point guards were practically perfect. That's as good a play as we've had from our point guards as we've had in four years here.

I thought our defensive intensity was good. The second half we could have done a few things better, but we never lost focus on the defensive end. They?re a very experienced and talented basketball team.

I think we are capable of winning when she has to sit. You have a frame of reference for a season, and that frame of reference is we have won without Jessica Davenport, it means we can do it again.

Jess is always going to be back with that little time left.

Jess was being guarded one-on-one, and that's a pretty good spot for us.

People who really follow women's basketball know there's two of them.

My program is not critical. It's almost like a billboard for the author's book. I've never presented it as being anything other than that. We get a dialogue going and we get to the point where it is a conversation. Mostly you hear the author and not Jim Foster. That's my goal.

I think if you were going to be surprised at something, it was the amount of time she spent in a defensive stance. That's new.

I think they probably were convinced they couldn't play any worse.

John's long tenure with our Construction and Real Estate business unit will enable that team to build on its continuing leadership as one of the premier software technology providers serving the construction and real estate industries.

When I first came in the league, I thought it was a 'welcome-to-the-league scheduling format,' where you open with the two teams who have dominated the league through the course of the last seven or eight years. Now I realize it's a tradition you have to live with.

We got the opportunity to work on some things, to try different combinations of players, to work on some little defensive adjustments ? especially in the second half.

We have a three-second play, and it involves Davenport at the other end of the court. That's not coaching genius.

We practice very intense and when it's game time the players go out on the field and do their job. The hardest we work is when we practice.

Winning it is great. We shared it with a pretty good team last year (Michigan State) and we had to go 14-2 to do that. We beat some really good teams this year, including arguably four of the best down the stretch.

We wanted to play people and look at some different combinations. Out-of-the-conference games you get some opportunities to do some things that you might not normally have.

You have to make a decision. When you open the inside game, it creates opportunities for quality looks from the perimeter and penetration. It's all about the inside game establishing itself so you can add those other dimensions.

We had the opportunity to work on things, play a combination of players, and adjust our defense, especially in the second half.

We scored a couple of times and that got us going again.

Adam didn't throw the ball great, but he did a good job of keeping us in the game.

Defense is the variable you have control over. Shooting the percentage we shot from the 3-point line is not a realistic expectation and being able to score at will from the block is not a realistic expectation. You should have high expectations of yourself defensively because that's about you.

A quality season is defined by winning ugly games. When you're making all your shots and there is a flow, it's all there, it's easy for everybody. ... When you look back, a great season sometimes comes down to winning these games.

And then in the second half, we were still scoring from that position. We're very capable of doing that.

You're talking about a kid who, when we signed her, the response was that she wasn't good enough to play in the SEC. She likes challenges.

There wasn't a panic mode. We stayed to the task at hand.

They played well. They came out and took care of business.

It's not ideal, and it's certainly not equal to being in school every day. But it's a better alternative than having to repeat an entire course because you missed two days over the limit. And it's a better alternative than having that student get frustrated and quit school altogether.

The (number) of teams that have the capability of winning the national championship is larger than it has been. In the past, there were only a few teams capable, but I think we're past that phase of our game.

That?s the Debbie Merrill we get to see every day at practice. We want her to be more involved in our offense. When she is shooting like that, it opens up opportunities for Brandie and it opens up opportunities for Packer on the perimeter. We become a very hard team to guard.

It's inevitable when you play a good team, they're going to make a run. I think we handled it. You have to execute your offense, and when a team is trying to take things away from you, you have to find other answers.

It was a frustrating week because of the weather. The time off affected the offense in the first game but the opposing pitcher threw well too.

I think all conference tournaments are (wide open). Somebody at the bottom is always starting to play well. In this case, I think you could say Penn State and Wisconsin are playing well.

He's our best hitter. He's starting to come around. When he's on, he uses the whole field, and that's what he did Sunday.

If I had any notion in my mind or my being that he would have done something like this, I would have had him in the deepest, darkest cell that I could find,

I doubt seriously he'll see South Carolina alive again, ... I would hope that they would charge him with a capital offense, and I would hope that they would carry it out.

I don?t you believe you spend a lot of time talking about a specific team as much as you talk about being prepared on a daily basis to play against the best teams. If you develop the habits necessary to do that, all your business is taken care of. You can?t work up for a big game and say, ?I?m going to be different today.? I think our team respects the game. Therefore they respect their opponents.

The guys played pretty well. I'd give them a B-plus. They got sloppy at the end of the game and made a few errors.

The guys believe that they can explode for some runs and that helps. I'd like to see them score with more consistency though. There is a trend of them getting the lead and then relaxing a little.